I could not believe my eyes.
I was a young prosecutor handling night court arraignments. Basically, I was formally accusing each defendant of a crime and then asking for bail. The courtroom that night was packed with Hasidim, each one trying to get my attention. And, then, I found out why. Next up?
A 23-year-old yeshiva student accused of sexually abusing his 10-year- old nephew.
The audience included his family, friends, rabbis, teachers, neighbors and community leaders, each calling me over with a pssst. They all wanted to press me for the release of the defendant. The message was the same; the approach subtly different. Some appealed to my Jewish sounding name. Others wanted me to know that my unborn children would never marry if I did not consent to the defendant’s release. A couple of people cursed me. Some implied that my career as a prosecutor would meet an untimely death if I did not “do the right thing.”
I had to make some phone calls.
And, then word came down from the top. No special favors. No deviation from the bail guidelines. I asked for, and received, an un-meetable bail. Yaakov was spending Shavuot in the hoosegow. But, I was not satisfied.
I wanted to indict everyone in the room as a co-conspirator.
A few years earlier, my best friend asked me to testify before a beit din brought by Baruch Lanner.My friend was being accused of defamation for alerting the public to Lanner’s sexual and physical abuse of children. I had some information and agreed to testify. And, then the phone calls began—rabbis, friends, people of influence imploring me not to appear before the tribunal. I didn’t care. I was determined. Then, I was told that one of my high school teachers would be sitting at Lanner’s table and would discredit me in a way that had proven extremely successful in discrediting other witnesses. He had the goods on me since I had been a well-documented troublemaker in school. Of course, disrupting history class should have no impact on the veracity of my testimony, but the warning was clear: I would do more damage than good to the case. And, in a decision that has since landed on the list of my top two lifetime regrets, I withdrew from the beit din.
My friend lost and had to apologize publically to a monster. I have never recovered from my disloyalty and cowardice. He died young.
These long-suppressed memories clawed their way back into my consciousness in recent months as the Jewish community has been rocked with a series of sex abuse scandals. I do not have much to say about the alleged abusers. They are defective and need permanent supervision. Here’s why: science confirms that they will never be cured. Even if physically restrained, their inclinations cannot be controlled. Are they capable of repentance and t’shuva? I don’t know, but I suggest that anyone who claims to know the answer to that question has an agenda. God alone knows what is inside our hearts. Lanner was among the most charismatic showmen in modern Jewish history. Only those who supported and loved him through his crimes and tribulations are ready to declare him repentant. And, you will excuse me if I am skeptical of their bias.
But, there is a special place in hell for those among us who condone, excuse, facilitate, or ignore the physical or sexual abuse of our children. And, the penthouse of that place is reserved for anyone tasked with educating and protecting children but who dare place the interests of the abusers over young putative victims. What’s that? You don’t want to offend the convicted pedophile? Don’t want to embarrass him? You’re ready to accept his half-witted declarations of regret and t’shuva? You credit his contributions to society and Judaism?
Here’s the thing. You are ten levels worse than the pedophile. You know why? Because he likely cannot help himself. He is sick and demented. You, however, are a misguided enabler of sexual abuse. You are a far greater threat to my children than any abuser because you lend credibility and mitigation to his misdeeds. Your message is that he can be forgiven and forgotten. But, you have no right to make that declaration, not only because you are not a victim, but because you have no basis for your opinion other than your relationship to the abuser or your liberal acceptance of any semblance of repentance.
I am not a victim so I would never presume to speak on anyone’s behalf. But before I can accept the public embrace of a known abuser, before I normalize relations with someone who has left a path of destroyed lives in his wake, I would like to hear a public apology; a credible acknowledgment of the horrors wreaked upon the innocent. I would like to hear from the victims to discover if any actual attempts were made by their abuser at legitimate repentance. I would like to know that there has been real progress in therapy. Finally, I would insist on knowing what efforts have been made to contribute in a meaningful way to the community, and have the abused been helped in any way. But, hey, that’s just me.
The tragedy of the Lanner story is not Lanner. It is of a beit din, a youth organization, a yeshiva high school, a national orthodox organization, a school psychologist, a troupe of loyal rabbis (some are still teaching in the yeshiva system) and many others who enabled 10 more years of victims and who, today, are nobly ready to let bygones be bygones. Some, like the OU, have taken steps to change the way they do business in a nod to the outrage and cycle of mistrust. But, others continue to facilitate and enable the abusers, to the detriment of the victims and potential victims. If you think I am talking about any specific person, you are wrong. But, here’s my thinking. If the choice is between forgiveness and compassion, on the one hand, or ultra-vigilant protection of our children, on the other hand, I land on the side of the children every single time. Let God forgive the pedophiles. Let their families and friends support them.
But if I am entrusting my children to you, I want to know that there are no circumstances, no excuses, no justifications that will lead you to err on the side of the abuser.
Ari Weisbrot is a prominent litigator in New York and New Jersey, and moonlights as an occasional writer. You can find his popular blog at ariweisbrot.com -- Ari grew up in Teaneck and lives in New Milford.
http://www.jewishlinkbc.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1185:the-eleventh-commandment-thou-shalt-not-enable&catid=155:op-eds&Itemid=567
EVERY SIGNATURE MATTERS - THIS BILL MUST PASS!
CLICK - GOAL - 100,000 NEW SIGNATURES! 75,000 SIGNATURES HAVE ALREADY BEEN SUBMITTED TO GOVERNOR CUOMO!
EFF Urges Court to Block Dragnet Subpoenas Targeting Online Commenters
CLICK! For the full motion to quash: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/hersh_v_cohen/UOJ-motiontoquashmemo.pdf
Friday, July 26, 2013
Clerical Sexual Abuse Among Catholics and Jews: Comparisons and Contrasts
Guest Contributor: Shalom Goldman, Duke University
Many Catholics in the US and overseas are hoping that the new Pope, Francis I, will help heal the wounds inflicted on the Church by the sexual abuse scandals of the past few decades. And many Catholic victims of clerical sexual abuse, while reminding us that their wounds are deep and permanent, see a healing of the Church as a necessary component of their individual recoveries.
Moral outrage about clerical abuse is directed not only at the abusers but also at those in the Church hierarchy who have covered up the abuse. But the damage to Church institutions is more than moral; lawsuits and the resulting awards and settlements threaten to bankrupt many a diocese. Particularly egregious was the behavior of the former archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger M. Mahoney, who, along with other Church officials, worked assiduously to cover up many cases of clerical abuse. In the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties, when abusive priests came to the cardinal’s attention, he arranged to have them reassigned, and in some cases the priest was reassigned to a diocese in which he would again be working with children.
The Church hierarchy’s inability to confront the reality of the actual sexual lives of both clergy and laity is today glaringly apparent. The great majority of American Catholics do not follow the Church’s dictates on birth control. And the Church’s blanket condemnation of homosexuality is out of sync with changing American values (see, for example, recent polls on gay marriage.) To some extent, the Church is reacting to these trends. But its reactions are slow and ponderous. Bishop Timothy Dolan of New York, whose name came up on many short lists of papabili (those considered for elevation to the Papacy), recently called on Catholics to adopt a more inclusive and compassionate approach to their gay co-religionists. In addition, a growing number of American Catholics are calling for the elimination of a celibate priesthood. Beyond that issue, some scholars of Catholicism, like Gary Wills in his recent book (Why Priests?), are calling for a thorough reconsideration and reevaluation of the priesthood.
But Catholics are not the only American religious minority beset by clergy sexual scandals and by conflicts between hierarchy and laity. As Mark Oppenheimer noted in a New York Times article last month, no American religious group seems free of sexual scandal.
A group that has been particularly hard hit with scandals this past year is the Orthodox Jewish community in its many forms. Just as ninety percent of American Catholics reject Church teachings on birth control, over ninety percent of American Jews (who either belong to Conservative or Reform congregations or are unaffiliated) reject Rabbinic Judaism’s teachings about the regulation of sexual behavior, especially when it comes to “family purity.” This euphemism refers to abstinence from sexual activity during a woman’s period—and at least a week beyond it. In Orthodox Jewish law men are forbidden all physical contact with their wives during a woman’s extended period of “menstrual impurity.” Thus many Orthodox households, and all Ultra-Orthodox households, have “separate beds” in the bedroom—so that the couple can sleep together, or apart, as the woman’s menstrual cycle determines.
It is within these same Jewish communities that consider themselves bound by such laws that sexual abuse scandals have recently come to light. The variety and magnitude of these scandals, though on a scale far smaller than those in the Catholic Church, have sent shockwaves through the Jewish world. What the results will be is hard to predict. For, unlike Roman Catholics, Jewish religious communities are not unified in their religious rules, behaviors, or attitudes. Rather, they are divided, contentious and famously argumentative. Behind the headlines of recent sexual scandals there have been some strange synchronicities between the Catholic and Jewish incidents.
On the same day in late 2012 that the charges against Bishop Mahoney were detailed in a lawsuit filed against the Los Angeles archdiocese, a State Supreme Court Judge in New York sentenced Nechemya Weberman, a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, to the attention-getting sentence of 103 years in prison. Weberman’s victim, an eighteen-year-old Hasidic woman whom he had been abusing for six years (under the pretext of being her “therapist”) had implored the judge to impose the maximum sentence. He fulfilled her request.
In the six years that she was abused, this Hasidic young woman did not remain silent about her situation; she complained to family members and school authorities. But she could not break through the wall of silence imposed by her ultra-Orthodox family, school, synagogue, and community. State Supreme Court Justice John C. Ingram praised the victim’s “courage and bravery in coming forward.” Sadly, though, the perpetrator’s and victim’s own community, the Satmar Hasidim of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Kiryat Yoel, New York, have not displayed the same courage and bravery in confronting abusers in their midst. To the contrary, like their Catholic clerical counterparts, they have tried to keep the lid on news of this and other emerging scandals.
That sexual abuse could be hidden, and news of it suppressed, within the Satmar Hasidim (American Judaism’s most separatist community) is not that surprising, since most of its members have little contact with the outside world.
A much greater scandal erupted when – a few months after the revelations about Weberman the Ultra-Orthodox “therapist” – a pattern of sexual abuse, deception and cover-up at Yeshiva University was revealed. YU is the flagship institution of Modern Orthodox Judaism. Reports of abuse were revealed to the press by an intrepid journalist and activist, Mordechai Twersky. Now living in Israel, Twersky was himself abused while at the Yeshiva high school—and he had been petitioning YU’s leaders to address the issue for over a decade. It seems that his patience finally ran out.
In contrast to the separatist and anti-modern tendencies of the Satmar Hasidim, the Orthodox Jews affiliated with Yeshiva University pride themselves on their openness to modernity. YU’s motto is Torah Umada—Torah and Science—an explicit embrace of both tradition and modernity. One would expect that a community that fully embraced modernity would be able to face such revelations in a direct and rational manner.
The revelations about Yeshiva University concern rabbis and male students at Manhattan Talmudic Academy, the boys’ high school affiliated with Yeshiva University.
These young men (close to forty cases have emerged to date) had been abused by their teachers in the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties.
The Y.U. case came to public attention in December 2012 when the New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, broke the story. In that same period, stories about covered-up cases of sexual abuse at prep schools—Horace Mann and Deerfield, among others—appeared in the press. Forward journalist Paul Berger reported that “Yeshiva University for years ignored students who claimed that they were sexually abused by two former staff members at Y.U.’s high school for boys in Manhattan.”
While many American Catholics now seem open to criticism of their own communities, and of their clergy, no matter how elevated the status of the clergyman, spokespersons for Jewish communities, reluctant to wash their laundry in public, have been fiercely protective of clergy and teachers.
The Forward has been descrying the reluctance of Y.U. faculty and students to demand action by their university. This past month a graduate of Y.U. called on the school chancellor, Rabbi Norman Lamm, to resign. But Lamm is not only the university’s chancellor, he is also its Rosh Yeshiva, the institution’s spiritual leader. Voices calling for Lamm’s resignation, though, are few; for the most part, the Modern Orthodox Jewish community has been silent. Of the thousands of Y.U. graduates appealed to in an email petition, only 250 were willing to hold the university leadership accountable.
Both Catholics and Jews are minorities within the United States (Catholics forming one-quarter of the U.S. population, and Jews two percent). Members of both religious communities have confronted religious prejudice in Protestant America. Yet it seems that the smaller the minority, the more protective its reputation and leadership.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionnow/2013/05/clerical-sexual-abuse-among-catholics-and-jews-comparisons-and-contrasts/
Many Catholics in the US and overseas are hoping that the new Pope, Francis I, will help heal the wounds inflicted on the Church by the sexual abuse scandals of the past few decades. And many Catholic victims of clerical sexual abuse, while reminding us that their wounds are deep and permanent, see a healing of the Church as a necessary component of their individual recoveries.
Moral outrage about clerical abuse is directed not only at the abusers but also at those in the Church hierarchy who have covered up the abuse. But the damage to Church institutions is more than moral; lawsuits and the resulting awards and settlements threaten to bankrupt many a diocese. Particularly egregious was the behavior of the former archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger M. Mahoney, who, along with other Church officials, worked assiduously to cover up many cases of clerical abuse. In the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties, when abusive priests came to the cardinal’s attention, he arranged to have them reassigned, and in some cases the priest was reassigned to a diocese in which he would again be working with children.
The Church hierarchy’s inability to confront the reality of the actual sexual lives of both clergy and laity is today glaringly apparent. The great majority of American Catholics do not follow the Church’s dictates on birth control. And the Church’s blanket condemnation of homosexuality is out of sync with changing American values (see, for example, recent polls on gay marriage.) To some extent, the Church is reacting to these trends. But its reactions are slow and ponderous. Bishop Timothy Dolan of New York, whose name came up on many short lists of papabili (those considered for elevation to the Papacy), recently called on Catholics to adopt a more inclusive and compassionate approach to their gay co-religionists. In addition, a growing number of American Catholics are calling for the elimination of a celibate priesthood. Beyond that issue, some scholars of Catholicism, like Gary Wills in his recent book (Why Priests?), are calling for a thorough reconsideration and reevaluation of the priesthood.
But Catholics are not the only American religious minority beset by clergy sexual scandals and by conflicts between hierarchy and laity. As Mark Oppenheimer noted in a New York Times article last month, no American religious group seems free of sexual scandal.
A group that has been particularly hard hit with scandals this past year is the Orthodox Jewish community in its many forms. Just as ninety percent of American Catholics reject Church teachings on birth control, over ninety percent of American Jews (who either belong to Conservative or Reform congregations or are unaffiliated) reject Rabbinic Judaism’s teachings about the regulation of sexual behavior, especially when it comes to “family purity.” This euphemism refers to abstinence from sexual activity during a woman’s period—and at least a week beyond it. In Orthodox Jewish law men are forbidden all physical contact with their wives during a woman’s extended period of “menstrual impurity.” Thus many Orthodox households, and all Ultra-Orthodox households, have “separate beds” in the bedroom—so that the couple can sleep together, or apart, as the woman’s menstrual cycle determines.
It is within these same Jewish communities that consider themselves bound by such laws that sexual abuse scandals have recently come to light. The variety and magnitude of these scandals, though on a scale far smaller than those in the Catholic Church, have sent shockwaves through the Jewish world. What the results will be is hard to predict. For, unlike Roman Catholics, Jewish religious communities are not unified in their religious rules, behaviors, or attitudes. Rather, they are divided, contentious and famously argumentative. Behind the headlines of recent sexual scandals there have been some strange synchronicities between the Catholic and Jewish incidents.
On the same day in late 2012 that the charges against Bishop Mahoney were detailed in a lawsuit filed against the Los Angeles archdiocese, a State Supreme Court Judge in New York sentenced Nechemya Weberman, a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, to the attention-getting sentence of 103 years in prison. Weberman’s victim, an eighteen-year-old Hasidic woman whom he had been abusing for six years (under the pretext of being her “therapist”) had implored the judge to impose the maximum sentence. He fulfilled her request.
In the six years that she was abused, this Hasidic young woman did not remain silent about her situation; she complained to family members and school authorities. But she could not break through the wall of silence imposed by her ultra-Orthodox family, school, synagogue, and community. State Supreme Court Justice John C. Ingram praised the victim’s “courage and bravery in coming forward.” Sadly, though, the perpetrator’s and victim’s own community, the Satmar Hasidim of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Kiryat Yoel, New York, have not displayed the same courage and bravery in confronting abusers in their midst. To the contrary, like their Catholic clerical counterparts, they have tried to keep the lid on news of this and other emerging scandals.
That sexual abuse could be hidden, and news of it suppressed, within the Satmar Hasidim (American Judaism’s most separatist community) is not that surprising, since most of its members have little contact with the outside world.
A much greater scandal erupted when – a few months after the revelations about Weberman the Ultra-Orthodox “therapist” – a pattern of sexual abuse, deception and cover-up at Yeshiva University was revealed. YU is the flagship institution of Modern Orthodox Judaism. Reports of abuse were revealed to the press by an intrepid journalist and activist, Mordechai Twersky. Now living in Israel, Twersky was himself abused while at the Yeshiva high school—and he had been petitioning YU’s leaders to address the issue for over a decade. It seems that his patience finally ran out.
In contrast to the separatist and anti-modern tendencies of the Satmar Hasidim, the Orthodox Jews affiliated with Yeshiva University pride themselves on their openness to modernity. YU’s motto is Torah Umada—Torah and Science—an explicit embrace of both tradition and modernity. One would expect that a community that fully embraced modernity would be able to face such revelations in a direct and rational manner.
The revelations about Yeshiva University concern rabbis and male students at Manhattan Talmudic Academy, the boys’ high school affiliated with Yeshiva University.
These young men (close to forty cases have emerged to date) had been abused by their teachers in the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties.
The Y.U. case came to public attention in December 2012 when the New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, broke the story. In that same period, stories about covered-up cases of sexual abuse at prep schools—Horace Mann and Deerfield, among others—appeared in the press. Forward journalist Paul Berger reported that “Yeshiva University for years ignored students who claimed that they were sexually abused by two former staff members at Y.U.’s high school for boys in Manhattan.”
While many American Catholics now seem open to criticism of their own communities, and of their clergy, no matter how elevated the status of the clergyman, spokespersons for Jewish communities, reluctant to wash their laundry in public, have been fiercely protective of clergy and teachers.
The Forward has been descrying the reluctance of Y.U. faculty and students to demand action by their university. This past month a graduate of Y.U. called on the school chancellor, Rabbi Norman Lamm, to resign. But Lamm is not only the university’s chancellor, he is also its Rosh Yeshiva, the institution’s spiritual leader. Voices calling for Lamm’s resignation, though, are few; for the most part, the Modern Orthodox Jewish community has been silent. Of the thousands of Y.U. graduates appealed to in an email petition, only 250 were willing to hold the university leadership accountable.
Both Catholics and Jews are minorities within the United States (Catholics forming one-quarter of the U.S. population, and Jews two percent). Members of both religious communities have confronted religious prejudice in Protestant America. Yet it seems that the smaller the minority, the more protective its reputation and leadership.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionnow/2013/05/clerical-sexual-abuse-among-catholics-and-jews-comparisons-and-contrasts/
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Garbage Dreams!
This elite group is now headed to New York and New Jersey!
Our planet has a garbage problem. We simply consume too much and produce too much waste, while we reuse or recycle too little. What isn’t recycled is frequently placed in landfills, burned, or left where it can damage the environment - 42 Broadway, New York City.
What Cannot Be Recycled?
In the United States what is recyclable depends on the type of recycling facilities nearby. Consult UOJ Earth 911 for a searchable database providing recycling centers in your Jewish area code.
Generally the following items cannot be recycled:
•Plastic bottles that contain oil or hazardous substances
Hazardous substances can contaminate other materials in the recycling centers, and can also catch fire easily. For example; Avi Shafran.
•Paint (Paint contains materials that are dangerous to the environment, and it cannot be mixed with other garbage for recycling.
•Bricks and building rubble
•Old toys
• Baby Diapers - Seniors' Kosher Alzheimers Diapers
•Milk cartons and Tetra Paks *
Paper, plastics, and sometimes metals are mixed together in these types of packaging.
•Styrofoam
Styrofoam is primarily made of petroleum, and the chemicals required to shape and mold it are not recyclable in the machines currently available.
•DVDs and CDs *
These are usually are made of both recyclable and non-recyclable of materials mixed together, and cannot be separated economically for recycling.
•Shredded paper with names of Jewish child-rapists!
Because shredded paper has shortened fibers, it tends to wreak havoc in sorting machines.
•Brightly colored paper *
The dyes in bright paper can ruin an entire batch of paper being recycled, just like one red sock in a wash load of whites. Paper mills can usually handle lighter tones.
•Juice boxes *
These usually contain paper, plastic, and sometimes metal that cannot be recycled all at once.
•Paper coffee cups *
The polyethylene lining, which prevents the coffee from leaking, also prevents the paper from being recycled.
•Pizza boxes, used napkins, and other food-contaminated wastes
Grease from the pizza mucks up the paper recycling process. Paper recycling uses water to form paper slurry, and water and oil don’t mix.
•Plastic bags *
These bags can wrap around recycling equipment and cause a plant to shut down for repairs. (Many supermarkets collect plastic bags for recycling.)
•Bottle caps - Yeshiva University yarmulkes *
The bottle cap is made from a different material than the bottle. If they are recycled together, the bottle cap can destroy the process for an entire batch of bottles.
•Some plastic bottles *
Which bottles are recyclable varies by type of plastic.
* Some neighborhoods may have supermarkets or recycling centers aka yeshivas, where you can drop off or process these items. Check Earth 911 for your area code.
Our planet has a garbage problem. We simply consume too much and produce too much waste, while we reuse or recycle too little. What isn’t recycled is frequently placed in landfills, burned, or left where it can damage the environment.
In the United States alone, each person creates almost five pounds of trash daily. This translates into Americans generating approximately 230 million tons of trash each year. Only a fraction of this garbage — about 32 percent — gets recycled.
Recycling in the USA
Recycling has already had a strong impact on the way we manage waste. In the United States, 1,500 aluminum cans are recycled every second. Recycling one can saves 90 percent of the energy used to make a new can, and produces 95 percent less air pollution and 97 percent less water pollution. One ton of recycled paper pulp saves more than a dozen trees, and prevents large amounts of air pollutants from entering the ecosystem. Recycling is now legally required by many U.S. cities, which have realized the economic and social benefits.
Waste management companies — as well as individuals who get cash for trash — know that recycling can be lucrative business. As The GARBAGE DREAMS Game illustrates, the amount, type, and value of trash varies from neighborhood to neighborhood.
Wealthier Jewish areas, for example, consume more and better (often disposable) products, and so produce more and higher-quality trash.
READ MORE: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/garbage-dreams/recycling.html
Monday, July 22, 2013
This is a column about Orthodox Jews!
....And the way they’ve played out in Orthodox Judaism illustrates anew that religion isn’t always the higher ground and safer harbor it purports to be. It can also be a self-preserving haven for wrongdoing....
The Faithful’s Failings
The men were spiritual leaders, held up before the children around them as wise and righteous and right. So they had special access to those kids. Special sway.
And when they exploited it by sexually abusing the children, according to civil and criminal cases from different places and periods, they were protected by their lofty stations and by the caretakers of their faith. The children’s accusations were met with skepticism. The community of the faithful either couldn’t believe what had happened or didn’t want it exposed to public view: why give outsiders a fresh cause to be critical? So the unpleasantness was hushed up.
This is not a column about the Catholic Church.
This is a column about Orthodox Jews, who have recently had similar misdeeds exposed, similar cover-ups revealed.
And I’m writing it, yes, because the Catholic Church over the last two decades has absorbed the bulk of journalistic attention, my own included, in terms of child sexual abuse. There are compelling reasons that’s been so: Catholicism has more than one billion nominal adherents worldwide; endows its clerics with a degree of mysticism that many other denominations don’t; and is just centralized enough for scattered cover-ups to coalesce into something more like a conspiracy. The pattern of criminality and evasion has been staggering.
But some of the same dynamics that fed the crisis in Catholicism — an aloof patriarchy, an insularity verging on superiority, a disinclination to get secular officials involved — exist elsewhere. And the way they’ve played out in Orthodox Judaism illustrates anew that religion isn’t always the higher ground and safer harbor it purports to be. It can also be a self-preserving haven for wrongdoing.
Early this month, 19 former students of the Yeshiva University High School for Boys in Manhattan filed a lawsuit alleging sexual abuse by two rabbis in the 1970s and 1980s who continued to work there even after molestation complaints. The rabbis were also allowed to move on to new employment without ever being held accountable. School administrators, the lawsuit alleges, elected not to report anything to the police.
Rabbi Norman Lamm, the president of Yeshiva at the time, admitted as much in an interview with The Jewish Daily Forward. He said that when accusations against a faculty member were “an open-and-shut case,” he’d let the accused person “go quietly.”
Back then there was less alarm about, and understanding of, child molestation, he said. Back then he was also steering Yeshiva through grave financial hardship. A sex-abuse scandal wouldn’t have been a great fund-raising tool.
“The school made the conscious and craven decision to protect its reputation,” Kevin Mulhearn, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, told me Monday.
Is such a defensive mind-set really a relic of a less enlightened past? Earlier this year a prominent scholar at Yeshiva University, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, was caught on audiotape at a conference in London telling Orthodox leaders that Jewish communities should set up their own review boards to evaluate any complaints of child sexual abuse and determine whether to bother with the police. This contradicts state laws on mandatory reporting for teachers, counselors, physicians and such.
Schachter further discouraged police involvement by warning that accused abusers could wind up “in a cell together with a shvartze, in a cell with a Muslim, a black Muslim who wants to kill all the Jews.” Shvartze is a harshly derogatory racial term. Yeshiva University condemned the remarks but seemingly didn’t discipline Schachter, who didn’t respond to my request Monday for comment. Neither did Rabbi Lamm.
Rabbi Schachter’s aversion to law enforcement isn’t isolated. The ultra-Orthodox group Agudath Israel of America has taken the position that observant Jews should get a green light from a rabbi before notifying police about suspected molestation. It’s precisely this sort of internal policing that the Catholic Church did so disastrously, leaving abusers unpunished and children in harm’s way.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews in particular have prioritized their image and independence over justice. They have shunned Jews who took accusations outside their communities; in fact, Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, has cited that as a reason for minimizing publicity around child sexual abuse cases among Orthodox Jews. But over the weekend he changed tacks and gave The New York Post the names of some 40 convicted people.
Community intimidation is why 17 of the 19 plaintiffs in the Yeshiva case are identified only as John Doe, said Mulhearn, their lawyer, who mentioned another insidious wrinkle reminiscent of Catholic cases.
One of the abusers, he said, used religion itself to muffle a few abused boys. The rabbi allegedly invoked the Holocaust, which their parents had survived, telling the boys not to cause mom or dad any more suffering with a public stink.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/opinion/bruni-the-faithfuls-failing.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y&_r=0
The Faithful’s Failings
The men were spiritual leaders, held up before the children around them as wise and righteous and right. So they had special access to those kids. Special sway.
And when they exploited it by sexually abusing the children, according to civil and criminal cases from different places and periods, they were protected by their lofty stations and by the caretakers of their faith. The children’s accusations were met with skepticism. The community of the faithful either couldn’t believe what had happened or didn’t want it exposed to public view: why give outsiders a fresh cause to be critical? So the unpleasantness was hushed up.
This is not a column about the Catholic Church.
This is a column about Orthodox Jews, who have recently had similar misdeeds exposed, similar cover-ups revealed.
And I’m writing it, yes, because the Catholic Church over the last two decades has absorbed the bulk of journalistic attention, my own included, in terms of child sexual abuse. There are compelling reasons that’s been so: Catholicism has more than one billion nominal adherents worldwide; endows its clerics with a degree of mysticism that many other denominations don’t; and is just centralized enough for scattered cover-ups to coalesce into something more like a conspiracy. The pattern of criminality and evasion has been staggering.
But some of the same dynamics that fed the crisis in Catholicism — an aloof patriarchy, an insularity verging on superiority, a disinclination to get secular officials involved — exist elsewhere. And the way they’ve played out in Orthodox Judaism illustrates anew that religion isn’t always the higher ground and safer harbor it purports to be. It can also be a self-preserving haven for wrongdoing.
Early this month, 19 former students of the Yeshiva University High School for Boys in Manhattan filed a lawsuit alleging sexual abuse by two rabbis in the 1970s and 1980s who continued to work there even after molestation complaints. The rabbis were also allowed to move on to new employment without ever being held accountable. School administrators, the lawsuit alleges, elected not to report anything to the police.
Rabbi Norman Lamm, the president of Yeshiva at the time, admitted as much in an interview with The Jewish Daily Forward. He said that when accusations against a faculty member were “an open-and-shut case,” he’d let the accused person “go quietly.”
Back then there was less alarm about, and understanding of, child molestation, he said. Back then he was also steering Yeshiva through grave financial hardship. A sex-abuse scandal wouldn’t have been a great fund-raising tool.
“The school made the conscious and craven decision to protect its reputation,” Kevin Mulhearn, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, told me Monday.
Is such a defensive mind-set really a relic of a less enlightened past? Earlier this year a prominent scholar at Yeshiva University, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, was caught on audiotape at a conference in London telling Orthodox leaders that Jewish communities should set up their own review boards to evaluate any complaints of child sexual abuse and determine whether to bother with the police. This contradicts state laws on mandatory reporting for teachers, counselors, physicians and such.
Schachter further discouraged police involvement by warning that accused abusers could wind up “in a cell together with a shvartze, in a cell with a Muslim, a black Muslim who wants to kill all the Jews.” Shvartze is a harshly derogatory racial term. Yeshiva University condemned the remarks but seemingly didn’t discipline Schachter, who didn’t respond to my request Monday for comment. Neither did Rabbi Lamm.
Rabbi Schachter’s aversion to law enforcement isn’t isolated. The ultra-Orthodox group Agudath Israel of America has taken the position that observant Jews should get a green light from a rabbi before notifying police about suspected molestation. It’s precisely this sort of internal policing that the Catholic Church did so disastrously, leaving abusers unpunished and children in harm’s way.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews in particular have prioritized their image and independence over justice. They have shunned Jews who took accusations outside their communities; in fact, Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, has cited that as a reason for minimizing publicity around child sexual abuse cases among Orthodox Jews. But over the weekend he changed tacks and gave The New York Post the names of some 40 convicted people.
Community intimidation is why 17 of the 19 plaintiffs in the Yeshiva case are identified only as John Doe, said Mulhearn, their lawyer, who mentioned another insidious wrinkle reminiscent of Catholic cases.
One of the abusers, he said, used religion itself to muffle a few abused boys. The rabbi allegedly invoked the Holocaust, which their parents had survived, telling the boys not to cause mom or dad any more suffering with a public stink.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/opinion/bruni-the-faithfuls-failing.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y&_r=0
Sexual Abuse & Addiction
Children who survive abuse and neglect learn shame from their earliest days. Every one of us was placed at greater risk of abusing substances because we survived traumatic losses at the hands of those who were supposed to protect and nurture us. Yet we live in a world that does not grasp the disease of addiction and are afraid to hear our stories.
Lesser known fact about Sigmund Freud – early in his career he was all but laughed out of his field for suggesting that sexual abuse within families was a significant social problem. To remain respected he recanted his findings. Toward the end of his career he went back to his original claims and backed them up, demonstrating that this ugliness was indeed not simply at the fringes of society.
We’ve known for many decades now that sexual abuse is a significant social problem. We’ve made gains in our efforts to create awareness and reduce other forms of sexual assault, but we remain largely at a loss with regard to what happens within a family unit. Our laws treat children as property and we continue to maintain startlingly underfunded and overworked Child Protective Services as our primary form of intervention.
Our discomfort acknowledging the prevalence of sexual abuse is evident in the language we use. Media reports tend to minimize its significance and impact. One rarely reads of a child being raped. One reads of a child being “molested.” I’m repulsed every time I read about a child of 12 or 13 who engaged in “sex” or “sexual acts”, when in fact a child of this age is incapable of consent.
We water down and minimize because we are sickened to imagine what so many children experience. We cannot expect to make significant gains with social problems we’re uncomfortable discussing. It’s additionally problematic that our social problems are intimately connected to each other. As we struggle to make progress in prevention and intervention of substance abuse; we overlook the frequently underlying dynamics of surviving childhood sexual abuse.
We have language for “gateway drugs” but fail to identify gateway experiences. There’s little or no shame in admitting to alcohol or marijuana use. There are a myriad of obstacles to discussing a history of sexual abuse. The degree to which surviving traumatic experiences in childhood lead us toward addiction and alcoholism cannot be overstated.
We need to re-conceptualize “dual diagnosis treatment” as existing within a social context that perpetuates shame. We have language for disgrace but not for transformation. I have the honor of serving what our society labels as: drunks, junkies, druggies, whores, and welfare cases, who are characterized as immoral, weak, lazy, and crazy.
What I often see professionally are the combined effects of residual grooming, (the molding processes that manipulate a child’s understanding of their abuse), the excessive loyalty of being an Adult Child Of An Alcoholic/Addict (ACOA) and the social stigmas of living with addiction(s), mental health conditions, and being a survivor of what remain unspeakable acts. Each of these individually can be debilitating. Their combined impact requires that the survivor progressively claim personal power and develop a new identity.
Children who survive abuse and neglect learn shame from their earliest days. Every one of us was placed at greater risk of abusing substances because we survived traumatic losses at the hands of those who were supposed to protect and nurture us. Yet we live in a world that does not grasp the disease of addiction and are afraid to hear our stories.
We search for those with similar experiences. We find people we relate to in self help programs and group therapy. We seek out clinicians who get us. Bit by bit, we come to understand ourselves and we cease our self destruction, hiding, and hopelessness. We learn to speak the unspeakable. We accept that we need not be ashamed of what was inflicted upon us. We learn to live one day at a time.
We come to take pride in what we incrementally overcome and refuse to allow anyone but ourselves the right to define us. We come to accept that we are forever works in progress and that “failure” only occurs when we stop trying.
The outside world rarely learns of our successes. Our milestones occur privately in therapists offices, in AA, and NA. We are supported by kindred spirits and we celebrate with only the closest and most trusted of loved ones.
The average person will never experience the joy of witnessing transformation, much less achieve it for themselves. They cannot grasp the heroism of maintaining sobriety, overcoming the feeling of never being clean, or the guts it takes to break free of unhealthy loyalties. We remain marginalized and misunderstood. Mores the pity, for we are the very best of people.
When at last we are no longer stigmatized, we will revolutionize. Too many of our brothers and sisters become forever buried under the shame of judgment. What we survived does not define us. Our resilience and determination to achieve the lives we want does.
http://recoveryrocks.bangordailynews.com/2013/07/22/addiction/sexual-abuse-addiction/
Lesser known fact about Sigmund Freud – early in his career he was all but laughed out of his field for suggesting that sexual abuse within families was a significant social problem. To remain respected he recanted his findings. Toward the end of his career he went back to his original claims and backed them up, demonstrating that this ugliness was indeed not simply at the fringes of society.
We’ve known for many decades now that sexual abuse is a significant social problem. We’ve made gains in our efforts to create awareness and reduce other forms of sexual assault, but we remain largely at a loss with regard to what happens within a family unit. Our laws treat children as property and we continue to maintain startlingly underfunded and overworked Child Protective Services as our primary form of intervention.
Our discomfort acknowledging the prevalence of sexual abuse is evident in the language we use. Media reports tend to minimize its significance and impact. One rarely reads of a child being raped. One reads of a child being “molested.” I’m repulsed every time I read about a child of 12 or 13 who engaged in “sex” or “sexual acts”, when in fact a child of this age is incapable of consent.
We water down and minimize because we are sickened to imagine what so many children experience. We cannot expect to make significant gains with social problems we’re uncomfortable discussing. It’s additionally problematic that our social problems are intimately connected to each other. As we struggle to make progress in prevention and intervention of substance abuse; we overlook the frequently underlying dynamics of surviving childhood sexual abuse.
We have language for “gateway drugs” but fail to identify gateway experiences. There’s little or no shame in admitting to alcohol or marijuana use. There are a myriad of obstacles to discussing a history of sexual abuse. The degree to which surviving traumatic experiences in childhood lead us toward addiction and alcoholism cannot be overstated.
We need to re-conceptualize “dual diagnosis treatment” as existing within a social context that perpetuates shame. We have language for disgrace but not for transformation. I have the honor of serving what our society labels as: drunks, junkies, druggies, whores, and welfare cases, who are characterized as immoral, weak, lazy, and crazy.
What I often see professionally are the combined effects of residual grooming, (the molding processes that manipulate a child’s understanding of their abuse), the excessive loyalty of being an Adult Child Of An Alcoholic/Addict (ACOA) and the social stigmas of living with addiction(s), mental health conditions, and being a survivor of what remain unspeakable acts. Each of these individually can be debilitating. Their combined impact requires that the survivor progressively claim personal power and develop a new identity.
Children who survive abuse and neglect learn shame from their earliest days. Every one of us was placed at greater risk of abusing substances because we survived traumatic losses at the hands of those who were supposed to protect and nurture us. Yet we live in a world that does not grasp the disease of addiction and are afraid to hear our stories.
We search for those with similar experiences. We find people we relate to in self help programs and group therapy. We seek out clinicians who get us. Bit by bit, we come to understand ourselves and we cease our self destruction, hiding, and hopelessness. We learn to speak the unspeakable. We accept that we need not be ashamed of what was inflicted upon us. We learn to live one day at a time.
We come to take pride in what we incrementally overcome and refuse to allow anyone but ourselves the right to define us. We come to accept that we are forever works in progress and that “failure” only occurs when we stop trying.
The outside world rarely learns of our successes. Our milestones occur privately in therapists offices, in AA, and NA. We are supported by kindred spirits and we celebrate with only the closest and most trusted of loved ones.
The average person will never experience the joy of witnessing transformation, much less achieve it for themselves. They cannot grasp the heroism of maintaining sobriety, overcoming the feeling of never being clean, or the guts it takes to break free of unhealthy loyalties. We remain marginalized and misunderstood. Mores the pity, for we are the very best of people.
When at last we are no longer stigmatized, we will revolutionize. Too many of our brothers and sisters become forever buried under the shame of judgment. What we survived does not define us. Our resilience and determination to achieve the lives we want does.
http://recoveryrocks.bangordailynews.com/2013/07/22/addiction/sexual-abuse-addiction/
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Hiding Behind "Religious Freedom" - "The Educational System At Risk!"
Every Story Under The Sun - But The Truth!
Too Jewish! --- The identical lying distortions used by the Agudath Israel of America and their lackeys. This is about protecting their assets/real estate/business, nothing more! They have all demonstrated time and again, your children's safety mean nothing to them. Prayers and classroom teaching need not be held in privately held multi-million dollar edifices - renting space is not only plausible, but would greatly reduce tuitions. The Jewish and Catholic people have shown themselves to be weak-kneed and plain dumb.
Catholic Church lobbies to avert sex abuse lawsuits
SB 131 would give some victims of sexual abuse more time to file suit against employers. But church officials argue the bill opens it up to suits that are too old to fight.
At the height of the clergy sex-abuse scandal in 2002, Catholic leaders stayed silent as California lawmakers passed a landmark bill that gave hundreds of accusers extra time to file civil lawsuits. The consequences were costly.
California dioceses paid $1.2 billion in settlements and released thousands of confidential documents that showed their leaders, including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, had made plans to shield admitted molesters from law enforcement.
Now, state legislators are considering a bill that would give some alleged victims more time to sue. But this time, the church is waging a pitched battle in Sacramento to quash it.
A group affiliated with the church has hired five lobbying firms and spent tens of thousands of dollars fighting SB 131. Opponents argue that the bill unfairly opens the church, the Boy Scouts, and other private and nonprofit employers to lawsuits over decades-old allegations that are tough to fight in court. Two bishops have visited the Capitol to argue their case to the bill's chief author.
In the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the campaign extends to the very top. Archbishop Jose H. Gomez warned parishioners last month in the church newspaper that the proposal "puts the social services and educational work of the Church at risk" and urged them to press their lawmakers to scuttle it.
The church, Gomez said, "faces deep challenges from the government" and cited the proposal as an example without explaining what it would do. "Let's pray for our religious freedom … and let's exercise that freedom by contacting our legislators about SB 131," he wrote.
The current battle has roots in 2002, when lawmakers were searching for a way to respond to the unfolding clergy scandal. At the time, California's civil statute of limitations — or the time limit for plaintiffs to file lawsuits — was relatively strict for child sex-abuse claims.
Plaintiffs could sue alleged abusers or their employers until age 26. After that, they could sue within three years of finding links between past molestation and present psychological problems, but they could no longer sue employers who may have failed to protect them from known molesters.
The 2002 bill extended the three-year discovery rule to employers and lifted the statute of limitations on lawsuits against them for all of 2003, allowing a slew of claims related to decades-old abuse. Church leaders didn't mount a campaign against the bill. They didn't testify at hearings. They didn't write a single letter in opposition. The legislation zipped through both chambers of the Legislature — not one lawmaker voted against it.
"At the time it didn't seem like too unfair of a response to the sexual abuse of children," said Edward Dolejsi, executive director of the California Catholic Conference, the church's political arm. "I don't think anybody anticipated the exposure that would be there."
In 2007, the L.A. Archdiocese alone settled with more than 500 plaintiffs for $660 million. Church officials were also forced to make public a trove of confidential papers in January of this year. In an acknowledgment that the documents had sullied the church's reputation, archdiocese attorneys tried this year to get upcoming sex-abuse trials moved to another part of the state, saying the media firestorm had tainted the Southern California jury pool.
Since the California law took effect, lawmakers in other states have introduced similar bills, arguing that civil lawsuits are a key way for abuse victims to seek justice. But only three states — Delaware, Hawaii and Minnesota — have passed such laws, said Marci Hamilton, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York and an expert on child sex-abuse statues of limitation.
That's partly because of the Catholic Church's opposition efforts, she said, which have included hiring lobbyists and dispatching bishops to try to sway legislators. "The 2002 bill caught the church off-guard," said Hamilton, who supports lengthening the time child sex-abuse victims have to sue. "Now the Catholic bishops are bringing their A-game to California."......
READ MORE: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-church-bill-20130715,0,5709596.story
Too Jewish! --- The identical lying distortions used by the Agudath Israel of America and their lackeys. This is about protecting their assets/real estate/business, nothing more! They have all demonstrated time and again, your children's safety mean nothing to them. Prayers and classroom teaching need not be held in privately held multi-million dollar edifices - renting space is not only plausible, but would greatly reduce tuitions. The Jewish and Catholic people have shown themselves to be weak-kneed and plain dumb.
Catholic Church lobbies to avert sex abuse lawsuits
SB 131 would give some victims of sexual abuse more time to file suit against employers. But church officials argue the bill opens it up to suits that are too old to fight.
At the height of the clergy sex-abuse scandal in 2002, Catholic leaders stayed silent as California lawmakers passed a landmark bill that gave hundreds of accusers extra time to file civil lawsuits. The consequences were costly.
California dioceses paid $1.2 billion in settlements and released thousands of confidential documents that showed their leaders, including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, had made plans to shield admitted molesters from law enforcement.
Now, state legislators are considering a bill that would give some alleged victims more time to sue. But this time, the church is waging a pitched battle in Sacramento to quash it.
A group affiliated with the church has hired five lobbying firms and spent tens of thousands of dollars fighting SB 131. Opponents argue that the bill unfairly opens the church, the Boy Scouts, and other private and nonprofit employers to lawsuits over decades-old allegations that are tough to fight in court. Two bishops have visited the Capitol to argue their case to the bill's chief author.
In the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the campaign extends to the very top. Archbishop Jose H. Gomez warned parishioners last month in the church newspaper that the proposal "puts the social services and educational work of the Church at risk" and urged them to press their lawmakers to scuttle it.
The church, Gomez said, "faces deep challenges from the government" and cited the proposal as an example without explaining what it would do. "Let's pray for our religious freedom … and let's exercise that freedom by contacting our legislators about SB 131," he wrote.
The current battle has roots in 2002, when lawmakers were searching for a way to respond to the unfolding clergy scandal. At the time, California's civil statute of limitations — or the time limit for plaintiffs to file lawsuits — was relatively strict for child sex-abuse claims.
Plaintiffs could sue alleged abusers or their employers until age 26. After that, they could sue within three years of finding links between past molestation and present psychological problems, but they could no longer sue employers who may have failed to protect them from known molesters.
The 2002 bill extended the three-year discovery rule to employers and lifted the statute of limitations on lawsuits against them for all of 2003, allowing a slew of claims related to decades-old abuse. Church leaders didn't mount a campaign against the bill. They didn't testify at hearings. They didn't write a single letter in opposition. The legislation zipped through both chambers of the Legislature — not one lawmaker voted against it.
"At the time it didn't seem like too unfair of a response to the sexual abuse of children," said Edward Dolejsi, executive director of the California Catholic Conference, the church's political arm. "I don't think anybody anticipated the exposure that would be there."
In 2007, the L.A. Archdiocese alone settled with more than 500 plaintiffs for $660 million. Church officials were also forced to make public a trove of confidential papers in January of this year. In an acknowledgment that the documents had sullied the church's reputation, archdiocese attorneys tried this year to get upcoming sex-abuse trials moved to another part of the state, saying the media firestorm had tainted the Southern California jury pool.
Since the California law took effect, lawmakers in other states have introduced similar bills, arguing that civil lawsuits are a key way for abuse victims to seek justice. But only three states — Delaware, Hawaii and Minnesota — have passed such laws, said Marci Hamilton, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York and an expert on child sex-abuse statues of limitation.
That's partly because of the Catholic Church's opposition efforts, she said, which have included hiring lobbyists and dispatching bishops to try to sway legislators. "The 2002 bill caught the church off-guard," said Hamilton, who supports lengthening the time child sex-abuse victims have to sue. "Now the Catholic bishops are bringing their A-game to California."......
READ MORE: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-church-bill-20130715,0,5709596.story
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Child sex abuse: Why does the Jewish community tolerate it?
We must shift our interest from protecting the reputations of abusers and their institutions to helping abused children and preventing potential victims.
'The inescapable conclusion is that we are somehow able to rationalize child abuse as less than devastating and truly harmful to our children.
As I read the article, all I could think was, not again. ”Nineteen former students of a Manhattan high school run by Yeshiva University have filed a $380 million lawsuit against Yeshiva University accusing administrators and teachers of covering up decades of physical and sexual abuse.”
The courts are yet to decide whether they will hear this case, which alleges abuse dating back some 40 years, for in New York cases of child sexual abuse must be brought before a victim’s 23rd birthday. According to the Forward, the lawyer representing the alleged victims argues that the statute of limitations does not apply because Yeshiva University fraudulently covered up the abuse. For us, the Torah has no statute of limitations on liability. It is never too late to address the problems of sexual abuse in our community, and to take affirmative action to prevent it.
Irwin Zalkin, a preeminent litigator in abuse cases wrote in his op-ed, “The ‘Them Vs. Us’ Shtetl Mentality Protects Sexual Predators:”
“The sexual abuse of children in our society is a national epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 1-in-4 girls and 1-in-6 boys will be sexually abused by the time they are 18 years old. This is not a problem unique to the Orthodox Jewish Community, it crosses all social, religious and economic strata of our society.”
That this issue is prevalent across social, economic and religious bounds does not make it any less troublesome as we grapple with abuse in our own - Jewish - backyard. When cases like Yeshiva University and countless others like it come to light, we, as a community, must engage in serious introspection. And when rabbis - colleagues that we respect and admire – are involved, this cannot compromise our response.
The case of Yeshiva University High School for Boys reminds me of what happened with Baruch Lanner, a former high school principal and director of regions for the Orthodox Union’s National Conference of Synagogue Youth. When the story by Gary Rosenblatt of the Jewish Week broke in 2000, Lanner was accused of abusing numerous children that had been entrusted to his care during a period of more than 30 years. He was convicted in 2002 of sexually abusing two teenage girls at the high school where he was the principal, according to the New York Times.
In both the Lanner and Yeshiva University cases, rabbis and administrators allegedly protected the perpetrators, and, in the process, their institutions. In the current instance, after being allowed to quietly leave Yeshiva University and being honored at a farewell dinner, one of the named rabbis, Rabbi George Finkelstein, moved on to become a principal in another school and later became the director general of a synagogue. According to the Forward, Finkelstein was accused of further abuse while serving both of those roles.
The synagogue board, prior to hiring the rabbi, heard rumors and checked with an “authority” at Yeshiva University, the Forward reported, and twice the synagogue was reassured that the concerns were baseless. This was in 2001, within a year of when the Lanner case broke, the scandalous details of which were widely circulated in the Orthodox community.
In the words of the great Spanish philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Thus, we, as a community, must take these cases as a sign that it is time for soul searching, and ask, why do we tolerate child abuse?
Of course there are the monetary concerns associated with an institution’s damaged reputation. But putting that aside, there is also the misguided application of the halakhic principle “moser,” informing on another Jew to non-Jewish authorities. According to the Rambam, Maimonides, moser is usually done for financial benefit or to curry favor - neither of those are even remotely applicable in these cases.
The inescapable conclusion is that we are somehow able to rationalize child abuse as less than devastating and truly harmful to our children. And by we, I mean men. In many cases of documented abuse in religious communities, it isn’t women in positions of power deciding not to report acts of sexual abuse on defenseless children; it’s men. Studies are inconclusive, but it appears that the vast majority of child molesters are men, while only a small percentage are women, according to the National Council on Child Abuse and Family Violence.
Perhaps at some deep level, Jungian psychology suggests, males traditionally identify with the perpetrator and resist empathy with the victim. Each of us has a dark side that we keep hidden - even from ourselves. But when there is documented child abuse, the concern has to be for the abused children and potential victims, not the perpetrators.
In coming to terms with his own silence as a student at the Yeshiva University high school, Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky writes, “But what must be obvious to us now is that it is both folly in practical terms, and corrupt in spiritual terms to think that we are in any way strengthening Judaism through turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the cries of the innocent. Indeed, if Judaism means anything at all, only the precise opposite could possibly be true.”
What should we do to stop tolerating sexual abuse of our children? Rabbi Kanefsky put out a call to his YU classmates to offer their own apologies to those whose distress they ignored. The Rabbinical Council of America, at their recent convention, issued strong guidelines for preventing future cases of abuse. I would add to their list that we can insist that women are included in the oversight committees of organizations that deal with internal review of abuse and harassment issues.
It is now long past the time to realize that sexual predators do not stop until they are stopped. Above all, we must acknowledge that no matter the position of respect and authority that a colleague may hold, nothing can compromise our love and responsibility for all the children entrusted to our care.
Rabbi Yehoshua Looks is a teacher and a freelance consultant to non-profit organizations.
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/rabbis-round-table/.premium-1.536561
Irwin Zalkin, a preeminent litigator in abuse cases wrote in his op-ed, “The ‘Them Vs. Us’ Shtetl Mentality Protects Sexual Predators:”
....To suggest that the work of these experts should be rejected in favor of someone who has studied the biblical laws of marriage and divorce belies any sense of reason. To conjure up fear of persecution and advocate a “them against us,” this Shtetl mentality as a way of protecting sexual predators is criminal.....
CLICK: http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/the-them-vs-us-shtetl-mentality-protects-sexual-predators/2013/05/31/
'The inescapable conclusion is that we are somehow able to rationalize child abuse as less than devastating and truly harmful to our children.
As I read the article, all I could think was, not again. ”Nineteen former students of a Manhattan high school run by Yeshiva University have filed a $380 million lawsuit against Yeshiva University accusing administrators and teachers of covering up decades of physical and sexual abuse.”
The courts are yet to decide whether they will hear this case, which alleges abuse dating back some 40 years, for in New York cases of child sexual abuse must be brought before a victim’s 23rd birthday. According to the Forward, the lawyer representing the alleged victims argues that the statute of limitations does not apply because Yeshiva University fraudulently covered up the abuse. For us, the Torah has no statute of limitations on liability. It is never too late to address the problems of sexual abuse in our community, and to take affirmative action to prevent it.
Irwin Zalkin, a preeminent litigator in abuse cases wrote in his op-ed, “The ‘Them Vs. Us’ Shtetl Mentality Protects Sexual Predators:”
“The sexual abuse of children in our society is a national epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 1-in-4 girls and 1-in-6 boys will be sexually abused by the time they are 18 years old. This is not a problem unique to the Orthodox Jewish Community, it crosses all social, religious and economic strata of our society.”
That this issue is prevalent across social, economic and religious bounds does not make it any less troublesome as we grapple with abuse in our own - Jewish - backyard. When cases like Yeshiva University and countless others like it come to light, we, as a community, must engage in serious introspection. And when rabbis - colleagues that we respect and admire – are involved, this cannot compromise our response.
The case of Yeshiva University High School for Boys reminds me of what happened with Baruch Lanner, a former high school principal and director of regions for the Orthodox Union’s National Conference of Synagogue Youth. When the story by Gary Rosenblatt of the Jewish Week broke in 2000, Lanner was accused of abusing numerous children that had been entrusted to his care during a period of more than 30 years. He was convicted in 2002 of sexually abusing two teenage girls at the high school where he was the principal, according to the New York Times.
In both the Lanner and Yeshiva University cases, rabbis and administrators allegedly protected the perpetrators, and, in the process, their institutions. In the current instance, after being allowed to quietly leave Yeshiva University and being honored at a farewell dinner, one of the named rabbis, Rabbi George Finkelstein, moved on to become a principal in another school and later became the director general of a synagogue. According to the Forward, Finkelstein was accused of further abuse while serving both of those roles.
The synagogue board, prior to hiring the rabbi, heard rumors and checked with an “authority” at Yeshiva University, the Forward reported, and twice the synagogue was reassured that the concerns were baseless. This was in 2001, within a year of when the Lanner case broke, the scandalous details of which were widely circulated in the Orthodox community.
In the words of the great Spanish philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Thus, we, as a community, must take these cases as a sign that it is time for soul searching, and ask, why do we tolerate child abuse?
Of course there are the monetary concerns associated with an institution’s damaged reputation. But putting that aside, there is also the misguided application of the halakhic principle “moser,” informing on another Jew to non-Jewish authorities. According to the Rambam, Maimonides, moser is usually done for financial benefit or to curry favor - neither of those are even remotely applicable in these cases.
The inescapable conclusion is that we are somehow able to rationalize child abuse as less than devastating and truly harmful to our children. And by we, I mean men. In many cases of documented abuse in religious communities, it isn’t women in positions of power deciding not to report acts of sexual abuse on defenseless children; it’s men. Studies are inconclusive, but it appears that the vast majority of child molesters are men, while only a small percentage are women, according to the National Council on Child Abuse and Family Violence.
Perhaps at some deep level, Jungian psychology suggests, males traditionally identify with the perpetrator and resist empathy with the victim. Each of us has a dark side that we keep hidden - even from ourselves. But when there is documented child abuse, the concern has to be for the abused children and potential victims, not the perpetrators.
In coming to terms with his own silence as a student at the Yeshiva University high school, Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky writes, “But what must be obvious to us now is that it is both folly in practical terms, and corrupt in spiritual terms to think that we are in any way strengthening Judaism through turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the cries of the innocent. Indeed, if Judaism means anything at all, only the precise opposite could possibly be true.”
What should we do to stop tolerating sexual abuse of our children? Rabbi Kanefsky put out a call to his YU classmates to offer their own apologies to those whose distress they ignored. The Rabbinical Council of America, at their recent convention, issued strong guidelines for preventing future cases of abuse. I would add to their list that we can insist that women are included in the oversight committees of organizations that deal with internal review of abuse and harassment issues.
It is now long past the time to realize that sexual predators do not stop until they are stopped. Above all, we must acknowledge that no matter the position of respect and authority that a colleague may hold, nothing can compromise our love and responsibility for all the children entrusted to our care.
Rabbi Yehoshua Looks is a teacher and a freelance consultant to non-profit organizations.
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/rabbis-round-table/.premium-1.536561
Irwin Zalkin, a preeminent litigator in abuse cases wrote in his op-ed, “The ‘Them Vs. Us’ Shtetl Mentality Protects Sexual Predators:”
....To suggest that the work of these experts should be rejected in favor of someone who has studied the biblical laws of marriage and divorce belies any sense of reason. To conjure up fear of persecution and advocate a “them against us,” this Shtetl mentality as a way of protecting sexual predators is criminal.....
CLICK: http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/the-them-vs-us-shtetl-mentality-protects-sexual-predators/2013/05/31/
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Richard Joel: Bring In The Hon. Michael Mukasey To Mediate!
The YU Impasse: Putting A Price On Sexual Abuse
In the end I believe YU still has the responsibility — and opportunity — to prove that it is indeed bound by moral and Jewish values to validate the suffering of the victims. Deal with them with dignity, make amends, offer to go to mediation to reach a fair result and move on. It’s a practical solution, but it’s also the right thing to do.
Sorting through conflicting interests when it comes to compensation for alleged victims.
A few days before Tisha b’Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, I sat down and read a modern-day version of Eichah, the Book of Lamentations.
This was not an ancient prophet’s eloquent or poignant rendition of the destruction of the ancient Temple; it was the dry, legalese words of a lawsuit that lays out the case of alleged indifference, and fraud, accorded to high ranking and highly respected members of the administration and faculty of Yeshiva University in the 1970s and ’80s regarding the sexual abuse of high school students.
Centuries apart, the warnings — that immoral behavior, left unchecked, leads only downward — still resonate.
The litany of woes said to have resulted from the abuse, and the lack of acknowledgment that it was taking place, is painful to read: case after case, 19 teenagers at the time claiming physical, emotional and psychological distress and trauma; depression leading to drugs, alcohol or sexual addiction; inability to trust others; loss of relationships with loved ones; loss of faith; and suicidal tendencies.
The mind reels and the heart aches.
But is it true? After all, attorneys can make all sorts of allegations to strengthen their case, just as they can put any price tag on damages they demand — in this case $380 million.
Only a few weeks ago it was said to be $30 million, lending credence to those who suspect the plaintiffs are in this for the money, and to embarrass YU, if not bring it to its knees.
But even those close to YU acknowledge that abuse surely took place and went unreported, and that the suffering was real. Whether the lawsuit can overcome the high hurdle of the statute of limitations is for a judge to decide.
I hope this case never reaches the courts. But how does one sort out the conflicting interests between the alleged victims, insisting on compensation for what they’ve suffered, and YU, which has apologized for past misdeeds and is anxious to establish strong standards of conduct and move forward?
I am not an objective observer on these matters. Far from it.
I have great empathy for victims of sexual abuse in our community and have the journalistic scars to prove it, doing battle on that front for a number of years.
I am also the son, parent, brother and husband of YU graduates, and I am a graduate myself, deeply respectful of the vision and accomplishments of my alma mater.
I appreciate the dilemma faced by the leaders of the current administration of YU, which inherited a scandal that allegedly went on, and ended, long before they arrived on the scene. Now it is costing the institution a heavy price — more than $2.5 million for an internal investigation (due to be completed in about four weeks) and the prospect of greater numbers if the lawsuit proceeds. But the ultimate price could be far more in terms of YU’s proud reputation as the beacon of enlightened, ethical Orthodoxy.
No doubt the school’s leaders feel they are acting with integrity by carrying out the investigation and offering public apologies. President Richard Joel issued his “deepest, most profound apology” after the story broke in The Forward last December, noting that “the actions described represent heinous and inexcusable acts that are antithetical both to Torah values and to everything that Yeshiva University stands for.”
Rabbi Norman Lamm, on retiring from office June 30 as chancellor and rosh yeshiva (yeshiva head) after devoting his professional life to the institution, offered a more thorough and poignant confession than one would see in the corporate world. He acknowledged his personal wrongdoing in handling the matter and said he must do teshuva (repentance).
Some would say, isn’t it enough for the alleged victims to have forced YU to apologize, admit its wrongdoing and ensure such behavior could not happen again? Others would ask, why isn’t YU prepared to back up its public breast-beating with financial compensation for those who have suffered so long? Which leaves us to parse the motivations of those involved on both sides in terms of what they are really seeking.
Putting a dollar value on damages these days, in our litigious society, has become almost routinized. Lawyers are said to have a formula of sorts to work out compensation in cases of sexual abuse — a set amount of dollars per type of immoral act, multiplied by the number of times it occurred, etc. But such calculations for the hurt inflicted on a victim date back to the Talmud, where five categories are established: pain, cost of the cure, loss of earning capacity, loss of time, and humiliation.
The rabbis disagree on the specifics but concur on the concept. Some insist that the amount to be paid for humiliation, for example, should be based on how much one would pay not to have had it happen.
Part of the legal and moral complexities in the YU case is in applying 21st-century standards to behavior of decades past, a time when sexual abuse, as well as racism, bias against women and other forms of prejudice were commonplace and little-discussed or consciously thought about, if not fully accepted. It appears that YU officials at the time were, at best, unresponsive to the complaints from abused students and their parents. This was consistent with the culture of the times, as was the fact that the victims did not speak out.
Once the scandal broke, it appears that the school, no doubt based on legal advice, has hunkered down and gone silent publicly, following the path of the Catholic Church, Penn State University and other institutions accused of inaction in the face of past abuse by employees. YU surely hopes the findings of its internal investigation will put an end to the matter, but critics will insist it proves little and will call for an independent probe.
Those of us on the outside aren’t privy to whether serious negotiations took place between the school and the alleged victims before the lawsuit was filed, in terms of monetary compensation commensurate to pain suffered. But it’s not too late to avoid an ugly showdown in court. There, if the statute of limitations is upheld, the alleged victims will walk away empty and embittered, and YU will be seen by many as having valued dollars over ethics. Further, if a judge rules that the lawsuit can go forward and allows discovery, YU will have to either settle — with the plaintiffs in a better position — or open up its files, have its professional and lay leadership subject to deposition, etc. The results could be disastrous.
It was Reb Nachman of Bratslav who observed: “To arbitrate is to temper justice with charity.”
In the end I believe YU still has the responsibility — and opportunity — to prove that it is indeed bound by moral and Jewish values to validate the suffering of the victims. Deal with them with dignity, make amends, offer to go to mediation to reach a fair result and move on. It’s a practical solution, but it’s also the right thing to do.
Gary@jewishweek.org
http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/gary-rosenblatt/yu-impasse-putting-price-sexual-abuse
In the end I believe YU still has the responsibility — and opportunity — to prove that it is indeed bound by moral and Jewish values to validate the suffering of the victims. Deal with them with dignity, make amends, offer to go to mediation to reach a fair result and move on. It’s a practical solution, but it’s also the right thing to do.
Sorting through conflicting interests when it comes to compensation for alleged victims.
A few days before Tisha b’Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, I sat down and read a modern-day version of Eichah, the Book of Lamentations.
This was not an ancient prophet’s eloquent or poignant rendition of the destruction of the ancient Temple; it was the dry, legalese words of a lawsuit that lays out the case of alleged indifference, and fraud, accorded to high ranking and highly respected members of the administration and faculty of Yeshiva University in the 1970s and ’80s regarding the sexual abuse of high school students.
Centuries apart, the warnings — that immoral behavior, left unchecked, leads only downward — still resonate.
The litany of woes said to have resulted from the abuse, and the lack of acknowledgment that it was taking place, is painful to read: case after case, 19 teenagers at the time claiming physical, emotional and psychological distress and trauma; depression leading to drugs, alcohol or sexual addiction; inability to trust others; loss of relationships with loved ones; loss of faith; and suicidal tendencies.
The mind reels and the heart aches.
But is it true? After all, attorneys can make all sorts of allegations to strengthen their case, just as they can put any price tag on damages they demand — in this case $380 million.
Only a few weeks ago it was said to be $30 million, lending credence to those who suspect the plaintiffs are in this for the money, and to embarrass YU, if not bring it to its knees.
But even those close to YU acknowledge that abuse surely took place and went unreported, and that the suffering was real. Whether the lawsuit can overcome the high hurdle of the statute of limitations is for a judge to decide.
I hope this case never reaches the courts. But how does one sort out the conflicting interests between the alleged victims, insisting on compensation for what they’ve suffered, and YU, which has apologized for past misdeeds and is anxious to establish strong standards of conduct and move forward?
I am not an objective observer on these matters. Far from it.
I have great empathy for victims of sexual abuse in our community and have the journalistic scars to prove it, doing battle on that front for a number of years.
I am also the son, parent, brother and husband of YU graduates, and I am a graduate myself, deeply respectful of the vision and accomplishments of my alma mater.
I appreciate the dilemma faced by the leaders of the current administration of YU, which inherited a scandal that allegedly went on, and ended, long before they arrived on the scene. Now it is costing the institution a heavy price — more than $2.5 million for an internal investigation (due to be completed in about four weeks) and the prospect of greater numbers if the lawsuit proceeds. But the ultimate price could be far more in terms of YU’s proud reputation as the beacon of enlightened, ethical Orthodoxy.
No doubt the school’s leaders feel they are acting with integrity by carrying out the investigation and offering public apologies. President Richard Joel issued his “deepest, most profound apology” after the story broke in The Forward last December, noting that “the actions described represent heinous and inexcusable acts that are antithetical both to Torah values and to everything that Yeshiva University stands for.”
Rabbi Norman Lamm, on retiring from office June 30 as chancellor and rosh yeshiva (yeshiva head) after devoting his professional life to the institution, offered a more thorough and poignant confession than one would see in the corporate world. He acknowledged his personal wrongdoing in handling the matter and said he must do teshuva (repentance).
Some would say, isn’t it enough for the alleged victims to have forced YU to apologize, admit its wrongdoing and ensure such behavior could not happen again? Others would ask, why isn’t YU prepared to back up its public breast-beating with financial compensation for those who have suffered so long? Which leaves us to parse the motivations of those involved on both sides in terms of what they are really seeking.
Putting a dollar value on damages these days, in our litigious society, has become almost routinized. Lawyers are said to have a formula of sorts to work out compensation in cases of sexual abuse — a set amount of dollars per type of immoral act, multiplied by the number of times it occurred, etc. But such calculations for the hurt inflicted on a victim date back to the Talmud, where five categories are established: pain, cost of the cure, loss of earning capacity, loss of time, and humiliation.
The rabbis disagree on the specifics but concur on the concept. Some insist that the amount to be paid for humiliation, for example, should be based on how much one would pay not to have had it happen.
Part of the legal and moral complexities in the YU case is in applying 21st-century standards to behavior of decades past, a time when sexual abuse, as well as racism, bias against women and other forms of prejudice were commonplace and little-discussed or consciously thought about, if not fully accepted. It appears that YU officials at the time were, at best, unresponsive to the complaints from abused students and their parents. This was consistent with the culture of the times, as was the fact that the victims did not speak out.
Once the scandal broke, it appears that the school, no doubt based on legal advice, has hunkered down and gone silent publicly, following the path of the Catholic Church, Penn State University and other institutions accused of inaction in the face of past abuse by employees. YU surely hopes the findings of its internal investigation will put an end to the matter, but critics will insist it proves little and will call for an independent probe.
Those of us on the outside aren’t privy to whether serious negotiations took place between the school and the alleged victims before the lawsuit was filed, in terms of monetary compensation commensurate to pain suffered. But it’s not too late to avoid an ugly showdown in court. There, if the statute of limitations is upheld, the alleged victims will walk away empty and embittered, and YU will be seen by many as having valued dollars over ethics. Further, if a judge rules that the lawsuit can go forward and allows discovery, YU will have to either settle — with the plaintiffs in a better position — or open up its files, have its professional and lay leadership subject to deposition, etc. The results could be disastrous.
It was Reb Nachman of Bratslav who observed: “To arbitrate is to temper justice with charity.”
In the end I believe YU still has the responsibility — and opportunity — to prove that it is indeed bound by moral and Jewish values to validate the suffering of the victims. Deal with them with dignity, make amends, offer to go to mediation to reach a fair result and move on. It’s a practical solution, but it’s also the right thing to do.
Gary@jewishweek.org
http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/gary-rosenblatt/yu-impasse-putting-price-sexual-abuse
Monday, July 15, 2013
The Question
of Rabbinic Appointments - Nothing Ever Changes!
The appointment of
unsuitable candidates to rabbinical posts also influenced the rabbi’s ability to
function as an independent force in Jewish life. Acquiring a rabbinical post, then, was often more a function of a candidate’s personal (or familial) wealth than of his level of knowledge or character (though the two did not necessarily exclude each other).
Complaints about trade
in rabbinic posts are known from as early as 1587. By the eighteenth century, it
seems to have become quite common for wealthy families to acquire rabbinic posts
for offspring regardless of age, experience, or learning. Eventually a small
number of rabbinic families (among others,
Landau, Gintsburg
[Günzberg], Te’omim, Horowitz, and
Halperin) divided many of the major posts among
themselves. The incomes that these positions brought were often increased to
offset the heavy investment made in purchasing them, which led to
discontent...
The appointment of a rabbi was
a two-tiered process involving both the community’s lay leadership and
non-Jewish authorities. In order to fill a vacant rabbinic position, the kahal would summon a large-scale committee,
often made up of all those who had sat on the council in previous years. To
prevent corruption, it was often stipulated that candidates should have no
family connections with members of the community. Once a name was chosen, the
relevant non-Jewish authorities would be approached, and upon payment of a
suitable fee, would grant the candidate a license—in Polish, a
konsens—to take up the post. At this point, the community would
issue a formal letter of invitation together with a contract (usually for three
years) specifying the rabbi’s duties and income.
In practice, this system led to a great deal of corruption and a decline in rabbinical status. A particular problem involved the system of payments made to non-Jewish authorities. Communities often demanded that the chosen candidate pay the license fee himself and sometimes required that he make a personal contribution to the community coffers as well. If the committee choosing the rabbi was divided, each faction would use its connections with the non-Jewish authorities to ensure that their candidate received the konsens—sometimes even offering to increase the fee paid. Finally, the non-Jewish authorities themselves would sometimes intervene to choose a candidate whom they felt would act as a direct conduit enabling them to intervene in the running of Jewish communal life.
Acquiring a rabbinical post, then, was often more a function of a candidate’s personal (or familial) wealth than of his level of knowledge or character (though the two did not necessarily exclude each other). Complaints about trade in rabbinic posts are known from as early as 1587. By the eighteenth century, it seems to have become quite common for wealthy families to acquire rabbinic posts for offspring regardless of age, experience, or learning. Eventually a small number of rabbinic families (among others, Landau, Gintsburg [Günzberg], Te’omim, Horowitz, and Halperin) divided many of the major posts among themselves. The incomes that these positions brought were often increased to offset the heavy investment made in purchasing them, which led to discontent, especially among the poorer elements in society. Disputes over the choice of rabbi and division of incomes became ever more heated and led to a series of bitter legal cases in the eighteenth century, especially in Przemyśl, Lwów, Wilno, and Pinsk.
The appointment of unsuitable candidates to rabbinical posts also influenced the rabbi’s ability to function as an independent force in Jewish life. On the one hand, the rabbi was often considered to be dependent on—and so biased toward—the faction within the community that had secured his appointment. At the same time, he could also be regarded as the agent within Jewish society of the non-Jewish authorities who had, ultimately, appointed him. This impression was strengthened by the fact that, particularly in the eighteenth century, the authorities did sometimes make use of rabbis as means of administering Jewish society by issuing them direct orders that were expected to be fulfilled.
Finally, the honorific nature of rabbinic appointments meant that the chosen candidate often did not even move to the community he was supposed to be serving. Perhaps to put an end to this practice, in the later eighteenth century some communities abandoned fixed-term contracts in favor of life appointments. In addition, the title of rabbi of a certain community, once held for a term, could be retained for life, even if the individual in question had long since ceased to act as a rabbi and was now a businessman.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Monday, July 08, 2013
Lawsuit Says 2 Rabbis Abused Boys at Jewish High School
According to a 148-page complaint lodged in Federal District Court in White Plains, the abuse included one case, in 1980, of a rabbi who sodomized a 16-year-old student with a toothbrush in his dormitory room in Upper Manhattan. Another boy claims a different rabbi abused him at least 30 times, in his office and the school’s halls, between 1978 and 1982, the lawsuit says.
The lawyer, Kevin T. Mulhearn, said that the depth of the abuse, which the plaintiffs claim occurred between 1969 and 1989, did not come to light until The Jewish Daily Forward published articles about it beginning in December. The lawsuit, echoing The Forward’s reporting, said administrators of Yeshiva University, which runs the high school, brushed off complaints about the two rabbis for years, and after they left the school, the university did not notify their future employers about the complaints. One of the men, Rabbi George Finkelstein, went on to work at a Jewish day school near Miami for several years.
“Their abuse should have been avoided with a bare minimum of responsibility and compassion for the children in their charge,” Mr. Mulhearn said in an interview on Monday.
Matt Yaniv, the director of media relations for Yeshiva University, the lead defendant in the suit, said Monday, “As you can imagine, right now we cannot comment on pending litigation.”
However, Mr. Yaniv noted that an outside firm was continuing an “independent investigation,” initiated in January.
“It is anticipated that the investigation will be finalized and a comprehensive report will be released by Sullivan & Cromwell in the coming weeks,” Mr. Yaniv said in a statement. “We will address the findings publicly once the report is issued.”
Last week, in announcing his retirement, Norman Lamm, the Yeshiva University chancellor who was president when much of the abuse is claimed to have taken place, apologized for not responding more assertively when students began complaining about the two rabbis, who never were reported to the police. “At the time that inappropriate actions by individuals at Yeshiva were brought to my attention, I acted in a way that I thought was correct, but which now seems ill conceived,” Dr. Lamm wrote.
The lawsuit contains complaints from 16 former students who say they were abused by Rabbi Finkelstein, an administrator who became principal in the late 1980s before the school, responding to complaints, asked him to leave in 1995. The lawsuit says that Rabbi Finkelstein rubbed his genitals against students, either in an office at the school, at a dormitory or in his apartment, sometimes under the guise of wrestling. He also groped boys’ genitals while checking to see if they were wearing tzitzis, traditional fringes under the outer clothing, the suit says.
The three other complaints, including the one claiming sodomy, are against Rabbi Macy Gordon, who taught Judaic Studies and left in 1984. Neither rabbi could be reached for comment late Monday but in previous reports they have denied any misconduct. The lawsuit also said Yeshiva allowed a former student with a reputation for improper behavior to enter the high school dorm rooms, where he fondled students.
Each of them is seeking $20 million in damages, for a total of $380 million.
The allegations represent the latest chapter in a series of sexual abuse scandals at private high schools in New York City. In December, Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn settled a lawsuit brought by former students accusing the school of covering up decades of sexual abuse of boys by a football coach. Former students of Horace Mann, a top-tier private school in the Bronx, have come forward to claim they were sexually abused by teachers there for decades.
One major obstacle for childhood sexual abuse victims is the state’s statute of limitations, which requires negligence lawsuits to be filed by the time the victims are 21, Mr. Mulhearn said. However, he said, he planned to circumvent that statute by claiming that the school had engaged in fraud. He employed a similar strategy in representing students in the Poly Prep case, and when a federal judge said he would allow the case to go forward, the school settled.
Wednesday, July 03, 2013
Monday, July 01, 2013
RABBI NORMAN LAMM OF YU RESIGNS!
A Great & Honorable Man Steps Aside!
...."And it is to this I turn as I contemplate my response to allegations of abuse in the Yeshiva community. At the time that inappropriate actions by individuals at Yeshiva were brought to my attention, I acted in a way that I thought was correct, but which now seems ill conceived. I understand better today than I did then that sometimes, when you think you are doing good, your actions do not measure up. You think you are helping, but you are not. You submit to momentary compassion in according individuals the benefit of the doubt by not fully recognizing what is before you, and in the process you lose the Promised Land. I recognize now that when we make decisions we risk, however inadvertently, the tragedy of receiving that calamitous report: tarof toraf Yosef, “Joseph is devoured,” all our work is in vain, all we have put into our children has the risk of being undone because of a few well intentioned, but incorrect moves. And when that happens—one must do teshuvah. So, I too must do teshuvah.
True character requires of me the courage to admit that, despite my best intentions then, I now recognize that I was wrong. I am not perfect; none of us is perfect. Each of us has failed, in one way or another, in greater or lesser measure, to live by the highest standards and ideals of our tradition — ethically, morally, halakhically. We must never be so committed to justifying our past that we thereby threaten to destroy our future. It is not an easy task. On the contrary, it is one of the greatest trials of all, for it means sacrificing our very egos, our reputations, even our identities. But we can and must do it. I must do it, and having done so, contribute to the creation of a future that is safer for innocents, and more ethically and halakhically correct.
Biblical Judah was big enough to admit that he was small. He confesses a mistake. He can experience guilt and confront it creatively. After the incident with Tamar, he does not offer any tortured rationalizations to vindicate himself. He says simply and forthrightly: tzadkah mimmeni (Gen. 38:26), she was right and I was wrong. And with that statement Judah is transformed into a self-critical man of moral courage. He concedes guilt. He knows that he is guilty with regard to Joseph, and together with his brothers he says aval ashemim anachnu, “indeed, we are guilty.” Pushed to the limits of the endurance of his conscience, he rises to a new stature and achieves a moral greatness that is irrefrangible and pellucid.
This is what I am modeh as I reflect on my tenure. Tzadkah mimmeni. I hope that those who came forth and others who put their trust in me will feel that faith vindicated and justified. Modeh ani."....
READ FULL RESIGNATION LETTER:
http://blogs.yu.edu/news/2013/07/01/chancellor-lamm-announces-retirement/
...."And it is to this I turn as I contemplate my response to allegations of abuse in the Yeshiva community. At the time that inappropriate actions by individuals at Yeshiva were brought to my attention, I acted in a way that I thought was correct, but which now seems ill conceived. I understand better today than I did then that sometimes, when you think you are doing good, your actions do not measure up. You think you are helping, but you are not. You submit to momentary compassion in according individuals the benefit of the doubt by not fully recognizing what is before you, and in the process you lose the Promised Land. I recognize now that when we make decisions we risk, however inadvertently, the tragedy of receiving that calamitous report: tarof toraf Yosef, “Joseph is devoured,” all our work is in vain, all we have put into our children has the risk of being undone because of a few well intentioned, but incorrect moves. And when that happens—one must do teshuvah. So, I too must do teshuvah.
True character requires of me the courage to admit that, despite my best intentions then, I now recognize that I was wrong. I am not perfect; none of us is perfect. Each of us has failed, in one way or another, in greater or lesser measure, to live by the highest standards and ideals of our tradition — ethically, morally, halakhically. We must never be so committed to justifying our past that we thereby threaten to destroy our future. It is not an easy task. On the contrary, it is one of the greatest trials of all, for it means sacrificing our very egos, our reputations, even our identities. But we can and must do it. I must do it, and having done so, contribute to the creation of a future that is safer for innocents, and more ethically and halakhically correct.
Biblical Judah was big enough to admit that he was small. He confesses a mistake. He can experience guilt and confront it creatively. After the incident with Tamar, he does not offer any tortured rationalizations to vindicate himself. He says simply and forthrightly: tzadkah mimmeni (Gen. 38:26), she was right and I was wrong. And with that statement Judah is transformed into a self-critical man of moral courage. He concedes guilt. He knows that he is guilty with regard to Joseph, and together with his brothers he says aval ashemim anachnu, “indeed, we are guilty.” Pushed to the limits of the endurance of his conscience, he rises to a new stature and achieves a moral greatness that is irrefrangible and pellucid.
This is what I am modeh as I reflect on my tenure. Tzadkah mimmeni. I hope that those who came forth and others who put their trust in me will feel that faith vindicated and justified. Modeh ani."....
READ FULL RESIGNATION LETTER:
http://blogs.yu.edu/news/2013/07/01/chancellor-lamm-announces-retirement/
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
When The Uncircumsized Act Like The Circumsized! (OUCH)
The Catholic Church is still impeding police pursuit and conviction of clergy sex offenders, according to a former head of Victoria Police's sexual crimes squad.
Former Detective Inspector Glenn Davies, who now works with victims of clergy sex abuse, says his experience of working with the church is that it is "protectionist, elitist and dismissive of suggestions for change".
Mr Davies, who resigned from Victoria Police last year after he admitted briefing journalists about then-current investigations, made a submission to the Victorian inquiry into how the churches handled clergy sexual abuse. This was posted on the inquiry website late on Tuesday.
Ten submissions were posted on the website, including a defence of Towards Healing by one of its investigators, former police superintendent Paul Murnane, plus a second "right of reply" by Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart.
Similar to the Victoria Police evidence, Mr Davies says both the Melbourne Response and the Towards Healing process that covers the rest of Australia "are operating in a manner that is detrimental to the administration of justice and impeding the detecting, apprehending, prosecuting or convicting" of abusers.
He attacks the role and practices of the Melbourne church's investigator, independent commissioner Peter O'Callaghan QC, saying that – far from operating like a royal commission, as Mr O'Callaghan suggests – he is really just "a reputational risk manager" who makes recommendations about compensation.
Mr Davies says Mr O'Callaghan was aware of serious sexual offending by clergy but "refused to report offenders for investigation ... or make recommendations that would have protected children and vulnerable adults from further victimisation".
He says many cases of suspected sexual abuse were reported to church authorities but not acted on, clergy were not removed, investigations were not carried out, and appropriate protections were not planned or embedded into parishes.
He agrees that Mr O'Callaghan tells victims they can go to the police at any time, but says such "options talk" is heavily weighted in favour of the Melbourne Archdiocese quickly providing relief, counselling and compensation in place of a police investigation.
He lists 10 problems, suggesting the church processes "actively and systematically dissuaded victims of sexual crime from reporting their victimisation to the police", hindered police investigations, quickly provided suspects with details of the allegations which allowed the possible destruction of evidence, failed to protect the community, but provided protection and sanctuary to offenders.
Archbishop Hart's right of reply, written on June 5, follows an earlier one written last October defending the church and Mr O'Callaghan from scathing criticisms in the Victoria Police submission. Tabling 39 pieces of correspondence between church and police from 1996 to last year, he says the police have provided no evidence for their allegations.
Far from an alleged lack of engagement with police, the church co-operated extensively, did not dissuade victims from reporting, did not hinder police investigations, did not alert suspects about allegations, and did not move offenders to evade investigation after 1996, he says. He repeats Mr O'Callaghan's assertion that to suggest the independent commissioner has a conflict of interest is highly defamatory and wrong. (Somebody Is Lying Here!!!)
Archbishop Hart says the church takes precisely the same attitude about reporting to police as victim support groups, that both accept it is up to the victim, if now an adult. But the church would be happy to report all suspected offenders to police, if victims who wanted their identity kept secret could be protected. (Got a real bad case of the giggles)
Former Detective Superintendent Murnane was police liaison officer with the church for some years before he retired in 2007, and has since acted as a complaints assessor for the Towards Healing process . His submission says that though he does not conduct criminal investigations he does have the required skills, that he has helped several victims to report abuse to police, and that it is wrong to call him a church employee, as it suggests an allegiance to the church.
http://www.bordermail.com.au/story/1596791/church-still-hindering-abuse-cases/?cs=12
Former Detective Inspector Glenn Davies, who now works with victims of clergy sex abuse, says his experience of working with the church is that it is "protectionist, elitist and dismissive of suggestions for change".
Mr Davies, who resigned from Victoria Police last year after he admitted briefing journalists about then-current investigations, made a submission to the Victorian inquiry into how the churches handled clergy sexual abuse. This was posted on the inquiry website late on Tuesday.
Ten submissions were posted on the website, including a defence of Towards Healing by one of its investigators, former police superintendent Paul Murnane, plus a second "right of reply" by Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart.
Similar to the Victoria Police evidence, Mr Davies says both the Melbourne Response and the Towards Healing process that covers the rest of Australia "are operating in a manner that is detrimental to the administration of justice and impeding the detecting, apprehending, prosecuting or convicting" of abusers.
He attacks the role and practices of the Melbourne church's investigator, independent commissioner Peter O'Callaghan QC, saying that – far from operating like a royal commission, as Mr O'Callaghan suggests – he is really just "a reputational risk manager" who makes recommendations about compensation.
Mr Davies says Mr O'Callaghan was aware of serious sexual offending by clergy but "refused to report offenders for investigation ... or make recommendations that would have protected children and vulnerable adults from further victimisation".
He says many cases of suspected sexual abuse were reported to church authorities but not acted on, clergy were not removed, investigations were not carried out, and appropriate protections were not planned or embedded into parishes.
He agrees that Mr O'Callaghan tells victims they can go to the police at any time, but says such "options talk" is heavily weighted in favour of the Melbourne Archdiocese quickly providing relief, counselling and compensation in place of a police investigation.
He lists 10 problems, suggesting the church processes "actively and systematically dissuaded victims of sexual crime from reporting their victimisation to the police", hindered police investigations, quickly provided suspects with details of the allegations which allowed the possible destruction of evidence, failed to protect the community, but provided protection and sanctuary to offenders.
Archbishop Hart's right of reply, written on June 5, follows an earlier one written last October defending the church and Mr O'Callaghan from scathing criticisms in the Victoria Police submission. Tabling 39 pieces of correspondence between church and police from 1996 to last year, he says the police have provided no evidence for their allegations.
Far from an alleged lack of engagement with police, the church co-operated extensively, did not dissuade victims from reporting, did not hinder police investigations, did not alert suspects about allegations, and did not move offenders to evade investigation after 1996, he says. He repeats Mr O'Callaghan's assertion that to suggest the independent commissioner has a conflict of interest is highly defamatory and wrong. (Somebody Is Lying Here!!!)
Archbishop Hart says the church takes precisely the same attitude about reporting to police as victim support groups, that both accept it is up to the victim, if now an adult. But the church would be happy to report all suspected offenders to police, if victims who wanted their identity kept secret could be protected. (Got a real bad case of the giggles)
Former Detective Superintendent Murnane was police liaison officer with the church for some years before he retired in 2007, and has since acted as a complaints assessor for the Towards Healing process . His submission says that though he does not conduct criminal investigations he does have the required skills, that he has helped several victims to report abuse to police, and that it is wrong to call him a church employee, as it suggests an allegiance to the church.
http://www.bordermail.com.au/story/1596791/church-still-hindering-abuse-cases/?cs=12
Monday, June 24, 2013
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Rabbi's shocking comments on sexual abuse - "Young Boys May Have Consented To The Abuse!"
Rabbi Boruch Lesches, a former senior leader at Sydney's Yeshiva centre, talking about sexual abuse in the Jewish community.
A senior Australian rabbi who failed to stop an alleged paedophile from sexually abusing boys at a Sydney Jewish school said some of the man's victims may have consented to sexual relations and warned that involving police now would ''open a can of worms''.
Former senior Sydney rabbi Boruch Dov Lesches, who is now one of New York's leading ultra-Orthodox figures, made his remarks in a recent conversation with a person familiar with a series of alleged child rapes and molestation carried out by one man associated with Sydney's Yeshiva community in the 1980s. Rabbi Lesches' comments are likely to increase scrutiny of Australia's senior rabbinical leaders' handling of child sex abuse cases, amid allegations of cover-ups, victim intimidation and the hiding of perpetrators overseas.
In a legally recorded telephone conversation heard by Fairfax Media and provided to NSW detectives investigating the Sydney Yeshiva cases, Rabbi Lesches admitted to counselling the alleged abuser upon learning that he had sexually abused a boy a decade his junior. Rabbi Lesches said he told the man that both he and the boy would be forced to leave the Yeshiva community if he could not control his urges.
''If not, both of them would have to leave,'' he said.
Rabbi Lesches, who never informed police of the abuse, said he did not know that the man had ignored his warning and gone on to sexually interfere with at least three other boys during the late '80s. He said other Yeshiva leaders were responsible for supervising the man.
In the conversation, Rabbi Lesches suggested one of the man's victims, who was aged about 11 at the time of the abuse, may have been a consensual partner. ''Everyone was telling different stories and trying to put the blame on someone else,'' he said.
''We are speaking about very young boys … everybody says about the other one that 'he agreed to this'.''
When challenged on his position that young boys could give consent, Rabbi Lesches replied, ''You would be surprised,'' and added that some non-Jewish boys, who he termed ''goyim'', began acting or thinking sexually ''from the age of five''. He also said teenagers from poor backgrounds had ''nothing else to do in life, only thinking 24 hours about sex'' with each other, members of their own families and even ''dogs''.
Rabbi Lesches also said reporting the alleged abusers to police so many years after incidents occurred would ''destroy them and their children'' and cause pain for victims.
''Do not talk this way … when it is such a long time ago, everybody suffers,'' he said. ''If you start to do something about it will not be productive.''
A traditional rule known as Mesirah, which prohibits a Jew from reporting another's wrongdoing to non-Jewish authorities, remains a big influence in some ultra-Orthodox communities.
Rabbi Lesches, who did not respond to questions from Fairfax Media, is the third senior rabbinical leader to be identified as having known something about the abuse of boys at the Sydney Yeshiva in the '80s.
In February, Fairfax Media reported how the alleged perpetrator, who was sent overseas, had recently admitted guilt to some of his victims and told of how the centre's spiritual leader, Rabbi Pinchus Feldman, once warned him to stop what he was doing.
In response to that story, Rabbi Feldman released a statement saying he had no recollection of anyone confessing to him their involvement in child sexual abuse 25 years ago.
In early March, another senior rabbinical leader, Rabbi Moshe Gutnick, admitted he did not contact police after a young boy contacted him more than 20 years ago to report sexual abuse at Bondi's Yeshiva.
Rabbi Gutnick, who heads the Organisation of Rabbis of Australasia, said he received an anonymous phone call and alerted senior members of the Yeshiva to the boy's claims. He said that with the benefit of hindsight ''I would have probably called the police''.
Rabbi Gutnick is understood to have told Bondi detectives recently all that he could recall about the phone call. In a statement published in the Australian Jewish News earlier this year, he said he ''felt deeply saddened that I had not recognised what I only now know was a legitimate cry for help''.
''I appeal to the entire community - to victims and their parents to community members and leaders. If you have information please come forward to the police. Don't be afraid.''
Fairfax Media can also reveal the family of the man being investigated by NSW police over the sexual incidents at the Bondi Yeshiva are big financial supporters of the New York Monsey ultra-Orthodox community led by Rabbi Lesches. There are also allegations the alleged abuser has also lent a large sum of money to at least one senior ultra-Orthodox figure in Australia.
The alleged abuser was also appointed to the board of an Australian company involved in providing educational materials for Jewish students. He has in recent years been sheltered by a leading Los Angeles Jewish welfare group, with 2011 emails between the man and one of the organisation's senior members showing he was in danger of having his past in Sydney exposed.
''I have no idea how anyone found out - but calls are coming daily from many sources. So far, we've been protecting you,'' wrote an executive director from the LA organisation in an email to the man.
NSW police were alerted to alleged sexual abuse at the Sydney Yeshiva by their Victorian counterparts who were investigating two men over sexual assaults at the Melbourne Yeshiva school in St Kilda. Former St Kilda teacher David Kramer this year pleaded guilty to sex offences on students of the school and is awaiting sentencing. He was in a US jail over child sex offences committed in St Louis when he was extradited last year.
Another former worker at the Yeshiva St Kilda school, security guard David Cyprus, will stand trial next month over alleged sexual abuse offences against a dozen Yeshiva boys.
The school's former principal, Rabbi Abraham Glick, is now under police investigation over his handling of complaints about abuse over several decades, including the decision to send Kramer overseas. Rabbi Glick's nephew is the Victoria Police chaplain, Rabbi Meir Shlomo Kluwgant.
Outspoken Melbourne Jewish sexual abuse campaigner and founder of victim support group Tzedek, Manny Waks, said Rabbi Lesches' comments ''unfortunately seem to be consistent with the approach of many senior Orthodox Jewish figures in the community who for decades have been more concerned with silencing victims and protecting perpetrators as well as their institutions, rather than with protecting innocent children''.
Mr Waks said his organisation would provide the royal commission into religious groups' handling of child sex abuse cases with full details of what has been happening for decades in Australian Jewish communities.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/rabbi-young-boys-may-have-consented-to-sex-20130622-2opkf.html#ixzz2X4mhNsTM
Timothy Dolan: Go To Hell!
The Church’s Errant Shepherds
...But over the last few decades we’ve watched an organization that claims a special moral authority in the world pursue many of the same legal and public-relations strategies — shuttling around money, looking for loopholes, tarring accusers, massaging the truth — that are employed by organizations devoted to nothing more than the bottom line....
BOSTON, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. The archdioceses change but the overarching story line doesn’t, and last week Milwaukee had a turn in the spotlight, with the release of roughly 6,000 pages of records detailing decades of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests there, a sweeping, searing encyclopedia of crime and insufficient punishment.
But the words I keep marveling at aren’t from that wretched trove. They’re from an open letter that Jerome Listecki, the archbishop of Milwaukee, wrote to Catholics just before the documents came out.
“Prepare to be shocked,” he said.
What a quaint warning, and what a clueless one.
Quaint because at this grim point in 2013, a quarter-century since child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church first captured serious public attention, few if any Catholics are still surprised by a priest’s predations.
Clueless because Listecki was referring to the rapes and molestations themselves, not to what has ultimately eroded many Catholics’ faith and what continues to be even more galling than the evil that a man — any man, including one in a cassock or collar — can do. I mean the evil that an entire institution can do, though it supposedly dedicates itself to good.
I mean the way that a religious organization can behave almost precisely as a corporation does, with fudged words, twisted logic and a transcendent instinct for self-protection that frequently trump the principled handling of a specific grievance or a particular victim.
The Milwaukee documents underscore this, especially in the person of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, now the archbishop of New York, previously the archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009 and thus one of the characters in the story that the documents tell. Last week’s headlines rightly focused on his part, because he typifies the slippery ways of too many Catholic leaders.
The documents show that in 2007, as the Milwaukee archdiocese grappled with sex-abuse lawsuits and seemingly pondered bankruptcy, Dolan sought and got permission from the Vatican to transfer $57 million into a trust for Catholic cemetery maintenance, where it might be better protected, as he wrote, “from any legal claim and liability.”
Several church officials have said that the money had been previously flagged for cemetery care, and that Dolan was merely formalizing that.
But even if that’s so, his letter contradicts his strenuous insistence before its emergence that he never sought to shield church funds. He did precisely that, no matter the nuances of the motivation.
He’s expert at drafting and dwelling in gray areas. Back in Milwaukee he selectively released the names of sexually abusive priests in the archdiocese, declining to identify those affiliated with, and answerable to, particular religious orders — Jesuits, say, or Franciscans. He said that he was bound by canon law to take that exact approach.
But bishops elsewhere took a different one, identifying priests from orders, and in a 2010 article on Dolan in The Times, Serge F. Kovaleski wrote that a half-dozen experts on canon law said that it did not specifically address the situation that Dolan claimed it did.
Dolan has quibbled disingenuously over whether the $20,000 given to each abusive priest in Milwaukee who agreed to be defrocked can be characterized as a payoff, and he has blasted the main national group representing victims of priests as having “no credibility whatsoever.” Some of the group’s members have surely engaged in crude, provocative tactics, but let’s have a reality check: the group exists because of widespread crimes and a persistent cover-up in the church, because child after child was raped and priest after priest evaded accountability. I’m not sure there’s any ceiling on the patience that Dolan and other church leaders should be expected to muster, especially because they hold themselves up as models and messengers of love, charity and integrity.
That’s the thing. That’s what church leaders and church defenders who routinely question the amount of attention lavished on the church’s child sexual abuse crisis still don’t fully get.
Yes, as they point out, there are molesters in all walks of life. Yes, we can’t say with certainty that the priesthood harbors a disproportionate number of them.
But over the last few decades we’ve watched an organization that claims a special moral authority in the world pursue many of the same legal and public-relations strategies — shuttling around money, looking for loopholes, tarring accusers, massaging the truth — that are employed by organizations devoted to nothing more than the bottom line.
In San Diego, diocesan leaders who filed for bankruptcy were rebuked by a judge for misrepresenting the local church’s financial situation to parishioners being asked to help pay for sex-abuse settlements.
In St. Louis church leaders claimed not to be liable for an abusive priest because while he had gotten to know a victim on church property, the abuse itself happened elsewhere.
In Kansas City, Mo., Rebecca Randles, a lawyer who has represented abuse victims, says that the church floods the courtroom with attorneys who in turn drown her in paperwork. In one case, she recently told me, “the motion-to-dismiss pile is higher than my head — I’m 5-foot-4.”
Also in Kansas City, Bishop Robert Finn still inhabits his post as the head of the diocese despite his conviction last September for failing to report a priest suspected of child sexual abuse to the police. This is how the church is in fact unlike a corporation. It coddles its own at the expense of its image.
As for Dolan, he is by many accounts and appearances one of the good guys, or at least one of the better ones. He has often demonstrated a necessary vigor in ridding the priesthood of abusers. He has given many victims a voice.
But look at the language in this 2005 letter he wrote to the Vatican, which was among the documents released last week. Arguing for the speedier dismissal of an abusive priest, he noted, in cool legalese, “The liability for the archdiocese is great as is the potential for scandal if it appears that no definitive action has been taken.”
His attention to appearances, his focus on liability: he could be steering an oil company through a spill, a pharmaceutical giant through a drug recall.
As for “the potential for scandal,” that’s as poignantly optimistic a line as Listecki’s assumption that the newly released Milwaukee documents would shock Catholics. By 2005 the scandal that Dolan mentions wasn’t looming but already full blown, and by last week the only shocker left was that some Catholic leaders don’t grasp its greatest component: their evasions and machinations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-churchs-errant-shepherds.html?hp
...But over the last few decades we’ve watched an organization that claims a special moral authority in the world pursue many of the same legal and public-relations strategies — shuttling around money, looking for loopholes, tarring accusers, massaging the truth — that are employed by organizations devoted to nothing more than the bottom line....
BOSTON, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. The archdioceses change but the overarching story line doesn’t, and last week Milwaukee had a turn in the spotlight, with the release of roughly 6,000 pages of records detailing decades of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests there, a sweeping, searing encyclopedia of crime and insufficient punishment.
But the words I keep marveling at aren’t from that wretched trove. They’re from an open letter that Jerome Listecki, the archbishop of Milwaukee, wrote to Catholics just before the documents came out.
“Prepare to be shocked,” he said.
What a quaint warning, and what a clueless one.
Quaint because at this grim point in 2013, a quarter-century since child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church first captured serious public attention, few if any Catholics are still surprised by a priest’s predations.
Clueless because Listecki was referring to the rapes and molestations themselves, not to what has ultimately eroded many Catholics’ faith and what continues to be even more galling than the evil that a man — any man, including one in a cassock or collar — can do. I mean the evil that an entire institution can do, though it supposedly dedicates itself to good.
I mean the way that a religious organization can behave almost precisely as a corporation does, with fudged words, twisted logic and a transcendent instinct for self-protection that frequently trump the principled handling of a specific grievance or a particular victim.
The Milwaukee documents underscore this, especially in the person of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, now the archbishop of New York, previously the archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009 and thus one of the characters in the story that the documents tell. Last week’s headlines rightly focused on his part, because he typifies the slippery ways of too many Catholic leaders.
The documents show that in 2007, as the Milwaukee archdiocese grappled with sex-abuse lawsuits and seemingly pondered bankruptcy, Dolan sought and got permission from the Vatican to transfer $57 million into a trust for Catholic cemetery maintenance, where it might be better protected, as he wrote, “from any legal claim and liability.”
Several church officials have said that the money had been previously flagged for cemetery care, and that Dolan was merely formalizing that.
But even if that’s so, his letter contradicts his strenuous insistence before its emergence that he never sought to shield church funds. He did precisely that, no matter the nuances of the motivation.
He’s expert at drafting and dwelling in gray areas. Back in Milwaukee he selectively released the names of sexually abusive priests in the archdiocese, declining to identify those affiliated with, and answerable to, particular religious orders — Jesuits, say, or Franciscans. He said that he was bound by canon law to take that exact approach.
But bishops elsewhere took a different one, identifying priests from orders, and in a 2010 article on Dolan in The Times, Serge F. Kovaleski wrote that a half-dozen experts on canon law said that it did not specifically address the situation that Dolan claimed it did.
Dolan has quibbled disingenuously over whether the $20,000 given to each abusive priest in Milwaukee who agreed to be defrocked can be characterized as a payoff, and he has blasted the main national group representing victims of priests as having “no credibility whatsoever.” Some of the group’s members have surely engaged in crude, provocative tactics, but let’s have a reality check: the group exists because of widespread crimes and a persistent cover-up in the church, because child after child was raped and priest after priest evaded accountability. I’m not sure there’s any ceiling on the patience that Dolan and other church leaders should be expected to muster, especially because they hold themselves up as models and messengers of love, charity and integrity.
That’s the thing. That’s what church leaders and church defenders who routinely question the amount of attention lavished on the church’s child sexual abuse crisis still don’t fully get.
Yes, as they point out, there are molesters in all walks of life. Yes, we can’t say with certainty that the priesthood harbors a disproportionate number of them.
But over the last few decades we’ve watched an organization that claims a special moral authority in the world pursue many of the same legal and public-relations strategies — shuttling around money, looking for loopholes, tarring accusers, massaging the truth — that are employed by organizations devoted to nothing more than the bottom line.
In San Diego, diocesan leaders who filed for bankruptcy were rebuked by a judge for misrepresenting the local church’s financial situation to parishioners being asked to help pay for sex-abuse settlements.
In St. Louis church leaders claimed not to be liable for an abusive priest because while he had gotten to know a victim on church property, the abuse itself happened elsewhere.
In Kansas City, Mo., Rebecca Randles, a lawyer who has represented abuse victims, says that the church floods the courtroom with attorneys who in turn drown her in paperwork. In one case, she recently told me, “the motion-to-dismiss pile is higher than my head — I’m 5-foot-4.”
Also in Kansas City, Bishop Robert Finn still inhabits his post as the head of the diocese despite his conviction last September for failing to report a priest suspected of child sexual abuse to the police. This is how the church is in fact unlike a corporation. It coddles its own at the expense of its image.
As for Dolan, he is by many accounts and appearances one of the good guys, or at least one of the better ones. He has often demonstrated a necessary vigor in ridding the priesthood of abusers. He has given many victims a voice.
But look at the language in this 2005 letter he wrote to the Vatican, which was among the documents released last week. Arguing for the speedier dismissal of an abusive priest, he noted, in cool legalese, “The liability for the archdiocese is great as is the potential for scandal if it appears that no definitive action has been taken.”
His attention to appearances, his focus on liability: he could be steering an oil company through a spill, a pharmaceutical giant through a drug recall.
As for “the potential for scandal,” that’s as poignantly optimistic a line as Listecki’s assumption that the newly released Milwaukee documents would shock Catholics. By 2005 the scandal that Dolan mentions wasn’t looming but already full blown, and by last week the only shocker left was that some Catholic leaders don’t grasp its greatest component: their evasions and machinations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-churchs-errant-shepherds.html?hp
Friday, June 21, 2013
"When The Congregation Rallies Around The Priest..."
Religious Child Abuse: I'm proud of my friends Jan Heimlich and Liz Heyward!
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